is the deepest of personal and national disasters, though it happen, as it does happen, several thousand times a year.  Physical waste is bad enough—­the waste of strength and health that could easily be retained by fresh air, open spaces, and decent food, and is so retained among well-to-do children.  This physical waste has already created such a broad distinction that foreigners coming among us detect two species of the English people.  But the mental waste is worse.  It is a subject that Mr. Paterson dwells upon, and he speaks with authority, as one who has taught in the Board Schools and knows the life of the people across the bridges from the banana-box to the grave.

“Boys who might become classical scholars,” he writes, “stick labels on to parcels for ten years, others who have literary gifts clear out a brewer’s vat.  Real thinkers work as porters in metal warehouses, and after shouldering iron fittings for eleven hours a day, find it difficult to set their minds in order....  With even the average boy there is a marked waste of mental capital between the ages of ten and thirty, and the aggregate loss to the country is heavy indeed.”

At fourteen, just when the “education” of well-to-do boys is beginning, the working boy’s education stops.  For ten or eleven years he has been happy at school.  He has looked upon school as a place of enjoyment—­of interest, kindliness, warmth, cleanliness, and even quiet of a kind.  The school methods of education may not be the best.  Mr. Paterson points out all that is implied in the distinction between the “teachers” of the Board Schools and the “masters” of the public schools.  Too much is put in, not enough drawn out from the child’s own mind.  The teacher cannot think much of individual natures, when faced with a class of sixty.  Yet it would be difficult to overrate the service of the Board Schools as training grounds for manners, and anyone who has known the change in our army within twenty-five years will understand what I mean.  At fourteen the boy has often reached his highest mental and spiritual development.  When he leaves school, shades of the prison-house begin to close upon him.  He jumps at any odd job that will bring in a few shillings to the family fund.  He becomes beer-boy, barber’s boy, van-boy, paper-boy, and in a year or two he is cut out by the younger generation knocking at the door.  He has learnt nothing; he falls out of work; he wanders from place to place.  By the time he is twenty-two, just when the well-to-do are “finishing their education,” his mind is dulled, his hope and interest gone, his only ambition is to get a bit of work and keep it.  At the best he develops into the average working-man of the regions I have called unknown.  Mr. Paterson thus describes the class: