Important as the materials and methods of education are, we cannot afford to forget that there are two other elements of our problem, closely related to one another, which are in the end of greater importance. The first of these is the teacher. It is not a gratuitous slander upon the general body of teachers to say that the whole method of recruiting teachers and the conditions of the teaching profession tend to degrade teaching into a trade. A great deal needs to be done to exalt the teacher’s office in the public mind; and the teaching profession should be so honoured as to give it the first call upon the human material in the community. As things are, it is far too much regarded as a means of livelihood, comparatively easily qualified for, and tolerably well remunerated; and the training required for admission into the profession is quite inadequate. If only teaching were rightly esteemed and its practitioners held in such honour as even judges, who do a much inferior work, are held, it would be possible to exercise a far more careful selection of persons suited by their temperamental and moral characters for the work. For we have to look for something infinitely greater than the successful communication of knowledge, or the training of mental faculties. Robert Owen followed an essentially sound instinct when, having established a school for infants in New Lanark he put at the head of it a man who could neither read or write, but who was familiar with birds and flowers and had “a way with him.” Robert Louis Stevenson, writing of Wordsworth, says, “I do not know that you learn a lesson. You need not agree with any of his beliefs; and yet a spell is cast. Such are the best teachers. A dogma learned is only a new error, the old one was perhaps as good. But a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves and what is best in themselves that they communicate.” It was said during the education controversy in England that some teachers taught more religion in an hour’s arithmetic lesson than others did in a year of “religious instruction,” and the saying is true. It is the spirit communicated that makes the difference between a real and a spurious education.