During the war we have thought so little of our children that we have tumbled them out to work at the early age of twelve years in ever increasing numbers, solely to enable employers and others to get cheap labour. The Board of Agriculture has published figures which show that 300 boys and girls under twelve years of age, 6,400 between twelve and thirteen, and 4,300 between thirteen and fourteen have been thus robbed of their education. In this, Great Britain has shown herself less careful of her children than France. In the very early days of the war the French Minister of Education called upon the local education authorities throughout France to take extra care that the children of the soldiers were properly cared for and educated, because, as he said, while their fathers are fighting it would be a disgrace to France if the nation allowed the children to suffer. Wealthy England, on the other hand, has neglected her babies, has allowed profiteers to plunder the mothers, has taken boys and girls from school and thus robbed them of their very birthright. This is only a little worse than what we do in normal times, when throughout Lancashire we allow children to become “half-timers,” and, in even our best education districts, a child can go to full work at fourteen years of age, and so little care is taken in the choice of occupation that multitudes of boys and girls, after a few years at work, find themselves in a blind-alley--that is, an occupation which leads nowhere in after life, and which leaves young people on the industrial scrap-heap just when they arrive at years of maturity. I should like well-to-do mothers to contrast this with the training of their own children. First of all the home life, the nursery and the nurses, governesses and assistants to take care of the child and surround it with everything that it needs for its bodily and mental development. No care is too great for the child of a great house. The boy or girl who is lucky enough to be born of wealthy parents is sent to school, then to college, or to some institution where thorough training is given in order that a future in life may be secured. It is not expected that the boy or girl whose parents have money should go to work at fourteen years of age, and it is only sheer necessity which drives the children of the working classes into industrial and commercial life. Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, Oxford and Cambridge, and the other great schools and Universities of the land, are filled up mainly by those who can afford to pay to go there, and who are kept there because it is considered that education is of primary importance for these children of the well-to-do. It is worthy of note that neither in peace time nor in war time are the boys who attend the great public schools expected to go to work half-time. This patriotic privilege is reserved for the children of the working classes.