158 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



County Council scholars of the Elementary Schools 

 with the fee-paying students ; where they are, in a 

 sense, treated with special favour, and every effort 

 that the circumstances of a misguided sentiment will 

 allow is made to fulfil a futile hope. But it is in 

 vain. Indeed, the longer the elementary scholars 

 are at a Secondary School, the wider and more 

 apparent become the intellectual, moral, and physical 

 divergencies that mark them off from the Middle-Class 

 fee-paying students. They are in human life the 

 homologues of the " sprinters " among horses, which, 

 the more they are trained and oxygenated, the worse 

 become their running powers.* It is not only 

 Secondary School teachers who say that the Scholar- 

 ships awarded in London and elsewhere to Elementary 

 School children, are wasted alike financially and in 

 intellectual and moral results, but teachers at the 

 Elementary Schools tell me the same thing. They 

 know these children when they leave their school 

 to go to the Secondary School, and in many 

 cases they are able to follow their subsequent career 

 when they come down from the Secondary School 

 to enter life. What do they become ? After they 

 have received a secondary education which costs the 

 ratepayers of their district about one hundred pounds 

 a year, not counting the whole cost of officials, and 

 having remained two or three years at the Secondary 

 School, they become milk-boys, errand-boys, and so 

 on ! They will never adopt anything else than a milk- 



♦ See Mr. Robertson's article in this Journal, on the " Inheritance of 

 Staying Powers in Thoroughbred Horses," p. 76 ; and the Editorial Article 

 appended to it: "Some Sociological Considerations, &c.," p. 98-100. 



