The youth works in the training-school, and he defers to the future the final results of the process. He lays up wealth, as it were, by doing that which avails only to give him a larger income hereafter. It is much as if he put money into the banks. It has always appeared as though a purely scholastic education makes children averse to manual labor; that it results too much in every boy and girl leaving school desirous of engaging in work which is neither manual nor, what is mistermed, menial. It brings too often to expectant parents the disappointment experienced by Sir Francis Pedant, in Fielding’s comedy; that gentleman, it will be remembered, was very angry when he found that, instead of instilling into his boy at Oxford, as per contract, “a tolerable knowledge of stock jobbery,” his tutor had fraudulently crammed him with the works of all the logicians and metaphysicians from “the great Aristotle down to the learned modern Burgersdicius.” “Have I been at all this expense,” exclaimed Sir Avarice, piteously, “to breed a philosopher?” As a fundamental rule, it may be accepted that the knowledge which is best for use is also best for discipline, since any other supposition, as Herbert Spencer has shown, would “be utterly contrary to the beautiful economy of nature, if one kind of culture were needed for the gaining of information, and another kind were needed as a mental gymnastic.” The best end of any education is to equip boys and girls to earn their own living when they grow up, and to perform efficiently the duties to which they may be called when they reach the estate of manhood and womanhood; giving them that most valuable of all gifts on earth--personal independence--the capacity to stand on their own feet and look the world in the face, to take care of themselves, and those who belong to them. The question of technical and industrial education has received much intelligent consideration and very extensive application in Switzerland. Since 1884 the Confederation, to encourage the existing technical schools as well as the establishment of new ones, has been granting annual subsidies, which are becoming more and more liberal. The Polytechnic at Zurich, to which reference has been made in the previous chapter, is now well known as a model school of practical life, with mechanics, physics, and arts under a thoroughly scientific curriculum. Trade and industrial schools, as distinguished from polytechnical,--genuine establishments for teaching homely trades,--have been made a prominent as well as a compulsory feature in many of the Swiss educational systems. In some form these are to be found in every Canton, furnishing instruction in one or more branches of handiwork,--the boys preparing to become skilled workmen and competent foremen; and many a girl, though an indifferent scholar, by being taught cutting, needle-work, cooking, nursing, and methodical habits--accomplishments that bear so closely upon the happiness and the