and precocious love-making.  It was also perceived by economists about the same time that unless something was done for technical education, the old superiority of the British craftsman would speedily vanish.  It was further pointed out that the education of the Board Schools gave the pupils little more than the mastery of the merest elements, the tools by means of which knowledge could be acquired.  In order, therefore, to carry on general education and to provide technical training there were started simultaneously in every great town, but especially in London, Technical Schools, ‘Continuation’ Classes, Polytechnics, Young Men’s Associations and Clubs, Guilds for instruction and recreation—­under whatever form they were known, they were all schools.

Then the young working lad was invited to enter himself at one of these places, and to spend his evenings there.  ‘Come,’ said the founders, ’you are at an age when everything is new and everything is delightful.  Give up all your present joys.  Send the girl with whom you keep company, night after night, home to her mother.  Put down your cherished cigarette, cease to stand about in bars, give up drinking beer, go no more to the music-hall.  Abandon all that you delight in.  And come to us.  After working all day long at your trade, come to us and work all the evening at books.’

A strange invitation!  To forego delights and live laborious evenings.  Stranger still, the lads accepted the invitation.  They accepted in thousands.  They consented to work every evening as well as every day.  The inducements to join were, in fact, artfully devised with a full knowledge of boys’ nature.  What a boy desires, over and above everything else, more than the company of a girl, more than idleness, more than gambling, more than beer-drinking, more than tobacco, is association with other lads of the same age.  These Polytechnics or Institutes or Clubs gave him, first of all, that association.  They provided him with societies of every kind.  They added recreation to study; pleasure to work.  If half of the evening was spent in a classroom, or in a workshop, the other half was passed in orderly amusement.  There was, moreover, every kind of choice; the lad felt himself free, there were, to be sure, barriers here and there, but he did not feel them; there was a steady pressure upon him in certain directions, but he did not feel it; in some there were prayer-meetings; the boys were not obliged to go, but some time or other they found themselves present.  Then there were some who wore the blue ribbon of temperance; nobody was obliged to assume that symbol, but somehow most of them did, without feeling that they had been pressed to do so.  For the very work and life and atmosphere of the place into which beer was not admitted gave them a dislike for beer, with its coarse and rough associations.  Insensibly the boy who joined was led upward to a nobler and higher level.