156 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



the students who attend evening classes do so with a 

 genuine desire to acquire knowledge. Neither is it 

 denied that a few possess an inherent capacity which 

 enables them to reap the educational benefits that 

 are forthcoming. But these students would in any 

 case have obtained an education fitted to their 

 merits and have been able to pay for it in the ordinary 

 way. They belong to cultured Middle-Class families 

 and for them rate-aided classes are entirely unwarrant- 

 ed. All that is achieved by this modern sentiment 

 which sets out to provide educational facilities for the 

 masses, in much the same way that it has before in 

 history provided circuses for them, is the destruction 

 of many Secondary Schools by a scarce veiled com- 

 petition with ratepayers' money, which prefer not to 

 pauperise their pupils by accepting doles from the 

 rates or the State. 



University College School, London, has learned 

 the bitter lesson that environment cannot alter the 

 inherent defects of the children of the masses. It 

 cannot even do it when potential men are at the plastic 

 stage of boys. It made a generous experiment but 

 the processes of Nature have nothing to do with noble 

 aspirations nor with false hopes, and the " Hammer 

 of Thor " was fast falling upon its mistaken intentions 

 and futile aims. In considerate language that had 

 to be read between the lines, the Council of this 

 School had to admit the failure of the attempt to 

 convert by environmental influences, the morally 

 defective instincts and limited intellectual capacities 

 of the children from the elementary schools. And 



