L.—EDUCATION. 199 
it has seemed in the past as if the service and the joy were being woven 
not on the same but on different looms. And even now, when the 
workers have been granted or have exacted more tolerable conditions, 
there is still something patchy about their service and their happiness. 
Seven hours of joyless work they claim, or its equivalent in still more 
joyless dole; in the resultant eight hours of leisure little real joy is 
harvested and excitement rather than happiness is aimed at. It is easy 
to see how this has come about. 
It may be that within the limits of this Association the cause is to be 
found. It was to the discoveries of science that the industrial revolution was 
due. You all know how what was a blessing capable of mitigating human 
toil became for a time a power that relentlessly heaped more and more and 
more toil on human backs, and enrolled in the workers’ army even the 
tenderest children. And then the reaction came, and with the vote the 
power, and now the worker’s idea has changed. Work and pleasure are 
becoming isolated in water-tight compartments. More and more does work 
tend to get squeezed of all idea of pleasure. Less and less do we expect 
our fellow-men to find reasonable satisfaction in the performance of the 
bread-winning duties. Discontent is a necessary ingredient of life, but 
it ceases to be divine when it invades every corner of our active life, 
ousting from work all its redeeming qualities except the sense of comrade- 
ship, and the presence of that is often only tolerated because of its useful- 
ness against the common foe. The master craftsman of old had a happier 
and nobler conception of life than this. We do not wish to revive the 
methods of the middle ages. Could we not detain for the redemption of the 
new methodstheold possibility of pleasure in work beforeit is gone forever ? 
We need, however, a reasoned not a sentimental faith to have the right 
to delay the departure of a reluctant guest. So we must not be satisfied 
with augurial winks but must expose at some risk our deepest con- 
victions, even though they clash with our earliest hopes or our political 
predilections. 
Two convictions have grown upon me after intimate experience of 
thousands of boys between thirteen and nineteen. The first is that as a 
general rule the judgment passed upon them at thirteen holds good so far as 
intellectual development is concerned until they are eighteen, and, indeed, 
much later too, and that just as the supreme work of the world requires 
some creative power that lies dormant and is almost fairy-like in its 
elusiveness, so much of the work of the world requires little intellectual 
distinction and but a small dose of fancy. Fancy and distinction play 
their part, however, but it is a part that is independent of the warp and 
possibly of the woof of education. A plan might mar it. 
It follows from these that the purely school education is even now 
continued too long for some. At present the air is full of projects for 
extending the school life of all beyond the age of fourteen. This should be 
done for many pupils, but not for all, if full-time education is meant. 
Some pupils—and I am not thinking so much of the recalcitrant as of the 
willing learners—seem unable to open the gates of their minds to any 
. impressions or knowledge that may wish to enter through the form room. 
We teachers fumble with all the keys of knowledge that we possess, and 
yet we cannot unlock the entrance. We even call in the doctors with their 
wisdom and the faddists with their ‘Open Sesame’s,’ and we are still 
