If

be separated from the true poor. Malingerers would have no mercy shown them. parents capable, on their gross income-that is without deductions for drink and bettingof paying refuse to pay, they would be brought before the magistrate, under the Act of 1829 or that of 1905, and fined or imprisoned. The man would soon find that it is cheaper to pay. After a few years, I am optimistic enough to believe that such a system would cost the country nothing. The profits on the dinners would cover the whole cost both of feeding and, where absolutely necessary, clothing. The same principles apply to clothing as well as feeding, but the clothing question, except in the very pinch of winter, is not so urgent as that of daily bread. The system of weekly accounts would, moreover, have the not inconsiderable merit of keeping poor parents in constant touch with the school authorities, and from time to time a special report on the progress of each particular child could be transmitted with the account to the parent, thus giving the home a new direct interest in school life.

There is one other aspect of the question of the education of the children of the very poor that requires particular notice. The poor are a migratory people. From district to district they pass in search of work or possibly in flight from rent. Their children suffer in many ways from this moving of the family tent, but chiefly they suffer educationally. It is a practical difficulty of a most serious character, and one that must be met. I am not referring, of course, to the very special cases of the children on canal boats or the children of Egyptians. Those cases are only solvable either by compelling the children to come in or by making the parents submit the children at certain ages for examination, and if the children, being normal in health, do not reach a certain standard, by taking the children away from the parents for a certain period of the year. The migration of the poor casual labourer is another matter. It is one of the chief hindrances of the educational and social development of the very poor. The difficulty can only be met by a system of correspondence.

Before leaving a district a parent should be bound under severe penalties to inform the school at which his child attends as to his movements-such information to be used for scholastic purposes only-so that the attendance officer of the district or town to which he goes can be informed. In this way the child can be followed, and the head teacher of his new school informed as to his capacity, and generally supplied with his record at the old school. It would be possible, by some such method, to preserve an educational continuity; and the fact of such correspondence between schools would do something to keep various schools in constant touch with each other, both in respect to methods and the types of children.

In all the various questions relating to the education of the very poor, the one fact to keep in mind is the absolute necessity to place new thoughts, new wants, new ideals in the child's mind. To escape from an environment. is the only proper definition of progress, and the progress of a nation depends in the long run upon the widening horizon of the people

as a whole. Yet the people as a whole can have no extension of horizon while they are held down by the dead weight of ignorance in a considerable section of the community. If education can really reach the very poor— education, religious and secular, accompanied by sufficient food and healthy dwellingsthen the standard of the nation will rise and the nation itself with it. I therefore view with something like consternation the Government proposal to place the period devoted to religious teaching outside the period of compulsory attendance. It will rapidly destroy the hardlyacquired habit of school-going among the very poor; it will destroy the all-important household routine of early rising which the Act of 1870 made necessary, but which is entirely distasteful to English poor women in great towns; and it will, therefore, take away from the very class that needs it most that regularity of religious instruction and of daily duties which lies at the root of national life. This is the view of nearly everyone whose humble educational duties bring them into touch with the very poor in the great cities of England.

EDUCATION AND SOCIAL

PROBLEMS

IN dealing with the question of the education of the very poor, I referred to the relationship of drinking and gambling to poverty, and endeavoured to indicate some of the aspects that education bore to those terrible influences, and its power of carrying to a further point than the State itself could go the process of eliminating these causes of want and crime. In fact, education in the true and complete sense of the word, is a transforming force in all social action, and is often enough the only possible source of change. A case looks insoluble. A whole quarter of a city seems outside the range of civilization. But education, imposed on this wild community from without, almost unconsciously transforms the problem. Light and knowledge, hope and self-helpfulness, have flowed in, displacing ignorance, helplessness and social darkness.