Those who leave school at any age or stage should be best fitted to take up their life work instead of leaving unfitted for it, aimless and discouraged. Instead of dropping out limp and disheartened, we should train "struggle-for-lifeurs," in Daudet's phrase, and that betimes, so that the young come back to it not too late for securing the best benefits, after having wasted the years best fitted for it in profitless studies or in the hard school of failure. By such methods many of our flabby, undeveloped, anemic, easy-living city youth would be regenerated in body and spirit. Some of the now oldest, richest, and most famous schools of the world were at first established by charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such institutions have an undreamed-of future. No others so well fit for a life of respectable and successful muscle work, and perhaps this should be central for all at this stage. This diversity of training develops the muscular activities rendered necessary by man's early development, which were so largely concerned with food, shelter, clothing, making and selling commodities necessary for life, comfort and safety. The natural state of man is not war, hot peace; and perhaps Dawson[4] is right in thinking that three-fourths of man's physical activities in the past have gone into such vocations. Industry has determined the nature and trend of muscular development; and youth, who have pets, till the soil, build, manufacture, use tools, and master elementary processes and skills, are most truly repeating the history of the race. This, too, lays the best foundation for intellectual careers. The study of pure science, as well as its higher technology, follows rather than precedes this. In the largest sense this is the order of nature, from fundamental and generalized to finer accessory and specialized organs and functions; and such a sequence best weeds out and subordinates automatisms. The age of stress in most of these kinds of training is that of most rapid increment of muscular power, as we have seen in the middle and later teens rather than childhood, as some recent methods have mistakenly assumed; and this prepolytechnic work, wherever and in whatever degree it is possible, is a better adjunct of secondary courses than manual training, the sad fact being that, according to the best estimates, only a fraction of one per cent of those who need this training in this country are now receiving it. [Footnote 1: The Place of Industrial and Technical Training in Public Education. Technology Review, January, 1902, vol. 4, pp. 10-37.] [Footnote 2: See an article by Dr. H.E. Kock, Education, December, 1902, vol. 23, pp. 193-203.] [Footnote 3: See my Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town Forty Years Ago. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 192-207.] [Footnote 4: The Muscular Activities Rendered Necessary by Man's Early Environment, American Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 80-85.]