that they can pursue their craft with dignity and intelligence, without professing to teach the craft itself. The need for technical instruction arises from the fact that ordinary educational systems are not fitted to promote the rapid development of trade, manufactures, and commerce. The education of the industrial classes should bear on their occupations in life. The life of a laborer is spent in dealing with things which he has to convert into utilities. In this conversion he must take the properties inherent to each kind of matter and convert them into utilities by an intelligent application of forces, which he may guide but cannot alter. No man can create new properties in matter or subject it to the action of new forces. When working-men get a higher life, a life of intelligence and knowledge, they then can develop improvements in their industries by an economical application of force, and a wise use of properties in material. Not mere handicraft skill, with ten fingers disassociated from the head and the heart, can sustain mechanical industry. Machinery, when rightly understood and applied, will prove the greatest means of intellectual elevation, for its very purpose is to substitute the thought of the brain for the toil of the hand and the sweat of the brow. How excellent the old Greek poet is when natural forces are made substitutes for human labor: “Woman!” he exclaims, “you have hitherto had to grind corn, let your arms rest for the future! It is no longer for you that the birds announce by their songs the dawn of the morning. Ceres has ordered the water nymphs to move the mill-stones and perform your labor.” Technical education is to train the pupils to handiness; to supplement mental activity with physical dexterity. The object of teaching girls to sew is not necessarily to train professional dress-makers, but to make them careful and tidy in their homes. Workshop instruction is not to make boys carpenters and cabinet-makers, but to enable them to learn any trade more easily and make them generally handy. It is no small part of the value of such training that the workman may be fitted to render his home more commodious, to arrange a shelf or cupboard, to repair a broken piece of furniture, or possibly to decorate his humble home. But whether or not, in after years, the student sees proper to become or by necessity is driven to a professional use of his technical knowledge, this is not involved in the idea and system of its pursuit. Its purpose is that, when he leaves school, he shall carry with him an education serviceable for any occupation of life; to develop a dexterity of hand which will prove valuable under any circumstances, and at the same time furnish him with a means of healthy enjoyment. It is a simple recognition of the fact that a large number of the children must be destined to make their living by industrial labor. There is certainly something in the operation of learning a trade that is akin to capitalizing.