of the plants are always ready to lend a helping hand at the bellows and to stir the fire. With our present knowledge, this should be at once remedied, and broader, wiser, more healthy views of education taken. Geography and history would be read and studied with avidity, like romances, by the young and old, were our system altered, so that the one be something more than a pile of statistics, and the other a string of dates. Euclid is taught as if human beings were parrots, to be repeated by mere strength of memory; so that to the majority it is a horrid and unintelligible puzzle.

It is maintained by Helvetius and his set, that an infant of genius is quite the same as any other infant, only that certain surprisingly favourable influences accompany him through life, especially through childhood, and expand him, while others lie close-folded and continue dunces. The inner man of one is fostered into generous development; the other is crushed down, perhaps by vigour of animal digestion, evaporates, or remains stagnant. We might as well argue that an acorn could, by favourable or unfavourable influences of soil and climate, be nursed into a cabbage, or the cabbage seed into an oak; nevertheless, we must acknowledge the all but omnipotence of early culture and nurture; hereby we have either a dwarf bush or a high-towering, wide, shadowy tree. So with human beings, if we would but study man's nature, and train his brain as we develop a prize beast or flower, developing it to the utmost of its capacity, strengthening the weak parts, and teaching one and all what they have to guard against and control, we should have men worthy of human nature. We should study

mankind as well as books.

It is the duty of all men to note down with accuracy the circumstances of their own training and education, and try to trace how it helped, hindered, or modified the development of their capabilities. It is very important to instil into the minds of all, more especially the young, that there can be no effect without a cause, and that the same causes and conditions, under similar circumstances, will always produce the same effects. With this principle guiding them, searching from the effect back to its cause, each one would see how it is he is what he is, and why he differs from others trained in the same school and by the same system. If it were possible to ascertain what the inner life of the parents was about the time of birth, we should get the key to the marked peculiarities of the individual, and a reason why members of the same family often differ so materially from each other, and owing to this innate difference in their mental organisms, acted upon by surrounding circumstances, they gradually develop into quite different beings. This kind of teaching

would make all think and feel that there is a God under whose beneficent government we know that all that is consistent with wise and omnipotent law progresses, and is brought to perfection, and all that is opposed to Divine order is mercifully frustrated and brought to naught.

Next to health, our success in life depends on the clearness of our perceptions and the correctness of our observations, and all require to be taught; that it is not what he has, but how he has got it, and what he does with what he has, the world will estimate him by. To each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment of fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum of capability; the problem for each to solve is to find, by study of himself and of the ground he stands upon, what his combined inward and outward capability specially is; always remembering a new man is in a new time under new conditions, and his course can be the fac-simile of no previous one, but is by its own nature original. What we have to do is to make the outward capability fit the inward to the utmost of our power. It too often happens, though talented wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriended, dyspeptical, bashful-nay, what is worse than all, we are foolish; so life has been to most of us, for want of proper training and right explanation, a whole imbroglio of incapability; we go groping about for the right thing, and often clutch the wrong, and so several years of our life are spent, till the purblind youth, by practice and often dearly-bought experience, becomes a seeing man; nay, how many, from want of the right education—aye, owing to the wrong views engendered by the teaching they getspend their whole term, and in ever new expectations, ever new disappointments, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side, till at length, as exasperated striplings of three-score years and ten, they shift into their last enterprise-that of getting buried! With a helping hand here, and different teaching and explanations there, how different many lives might be!

TECHNICAL EDUCATION.

"Learn

That not to know at large of things remote
From use, obscure, and subtle; but to know
That which before us lies in daily life,

Is the prime wisdom."

MILTON.

"Whatsoever thou takest in hand, remember the end, and thou shalt never do amiss."

IN the first Napoleon's time, splendid success was secured by, and depended mostly upon, exceptional skill in the general that commanded; but to succeed now, it is requisite to have "efficient' men in the field, the factory, the warehouse-men trained so as to perform their allotted task in the most economical manner, by not only producing more, but producing it better, without any of the drawbacks and losses in the field, warehouse, and factory, when men do their task without the necessary technical knowledge to enable them to do it quickly and perfectly. "Technical education" is the want of the age we live in-alike in employer and employed, the soldier and the general. Germany has grasped this principle, and to it her army is indebted for its successes. The Germans have more scientific curiosity, take more interest in "truth" for truth's own sake, and reap the reward in a serious and painstaking habit of mind, open to receive information, and resolved to see "things as they are," to know all the truth about the universe which can be known. Instead of developing the intellect, preparing it to receive all the knowledge it can obtain, training the people to think, we teach them to believe tradition, and send them forth to begin the world with their brains clogged up with a lot of weeds, instead of good seed, ready for healthy development in the work of life.

To hold our own in the struggle of life, it is imperative that the basis of the education of the youth of this country be technical, instead of classical. They must be trained for business pursuits; they must have an idea of the life they are to lead; they must be better prepared for gaining their daily bread in the hard struggle, the increasingly harder struggle, of life; they must be trained to do their work well; they must be wise enough to know the false from the true economy-that

it is a great error of judgment to sacrifice quality to cheapness, to "spoil the ship for the ha'p'orth of tar," as we have been doing of late, and thereby bringing the goods of the nation into disrepute. We must elevate, not degrade, our labour. We want trades' unions to promote greater skill, and to do honour to the most skilful; not to reduce the better men to the level of the worst, and to try by combination to artificially enhance the price of labour. We must have a division of labour, that leaves the man a thinking being, not a mere automatic machine; we must have a something that will take the place of our apprenticeship" system. At present our youth are left to pick up their knowledge as best they may; there is nothing to encourage them to "excellence" in their work; and our social views of life are based upon that cursed thing, "false gentility;" so that, instead of the young being trained to follow some mechanical or useful employment, they wish to be clerks, or to sell tape or ribands. Tempt the young out of this senseless groove by cultivating a taste for "handicraft skill" in all the schools; rouse into activity that latent power of inventive skill by which England was made famous; honour labour in every way; stimulate our youth to try and restore to England in the markets of the world that supremacy we once enjoyed, but have lost by letting others go beyond us, by our indifference to the importance of doing our work well, by our ignoring the fact that, in commerce, the moral laws cannot be infringed with impunity, but that, as with the physical laws, any infringement thereof carries with it a corresponding retribution.

The superiority of the training workmen receive in foreign countries is such that we are being beaten on all sides. It seems incredible that, as stated by Mr. Anderson in his speech when introducing "technical education" to the House of Commons, on April 1, 1881, "in one of the largest ship-building establishments on the Clyde, he saw in one of the departments a large number of American-made machines, which he was told they could buy onefourth cheaper than in this country." Think over what this means, and if we are losing our commerce, seriously ask yourselves if the fault is not your own. An American machine-maker comes to this country, buys our steel and iron, carries them across the water, pays 33 per cent. for taking them into America, pays higher wages there than is paid in England, brings them back into this country, and yet undersells by 25 per cent. our manufacture. Analyze honestly any other commodity we are being beaten in, and you will find the same result staring you in the face. The fault is our own; and if we do not move ourselves, and remove the cause of our decaying trade, we deserve to be beaten, and to receive contempt where hitherto we

have had honour. The curse of this country is its complicated system of distribution; there are too many of the distributing class -too many profits that swell up the price of an article between the time it leaves the producer and gets to the consumer. Want of pride in the excellence of the work by the men, and enhancing the price by the large profits necessary to maintain the style of living by the middle class, is the cause of England's decline. We must revert to the laws of economy" in production and distribution; there is no other means of holding our own in the industrial struggle for supremacy. A makes an article; generally he buys the material on credit, and borrows the capital of a friend or banker to carry on his business; he sells on credit to B; B sells the article on credit to C; C sells on credit to D. And as regards the "foreign trade," where we are being beaten, the "agent steps in for his share, and as shipper, he buys of the retailer; and not satisfied with the commission they get from their clients, too many of them want a commission from the seller, and, as with too many buyers, confine their operations to such houses as will give it. The manufacturer, merchant, and farmer class are not, as they used to be, practical men,"captains of the ship," but simply the capitalists, and therefore needing a better paid class of officers to manage than used to be the case. Manufacturers, merchants, farmers, one and all, spend on an average £500 a-year now, where they spent £100 a quarter of a century ago; and this extra remuneration or profit has to be added to the price of the article, as it must be paid by the consumer. And herein lies one of the reasons why England is not able to hold her own in the world's competition as heretofore. A steelbarrelled gun for which we ask £12, can be bought at Liége for £4. In Belgium labour is cheap; true, but in America labour is dear; and, as Mr. Anderson stated in his speech, if you analyze the return of exports and imports for the year, you will find that it is in these articles, in which "technical education" is required, that exports have diminished and imports increased. The years are 1872 and 1879. The following are the rates per cent. of decrease in value of exports in the latter year as compared with the former: In cotton goods, 18 per cent.; woollen goods, 51 per cent.; silk, 23 per cent.; glass, 30 per cent.; iron, excluding the rough unfinished metal, 16 per cent. The decrease in the aggregate of our exports was 28 per cent. On the other hand, taking the imports, there was an increase, as between the two years, in cotton goods, of 54 per cent.; woollen goods, 40 per cent.; silk, 36 per cent. ; glass, 30 per cent.; iron, 49 per cent. The increase of the aggregate imports was 39 per cent. Thus it appeared that not only foreigners, but our own people, were becoming dissatisfied with our own manufactures.