200 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
treated as trespassers and locked out. These same children show them- 
selves by no means witless when faced with the problems of life. In a trade, 
with its direct bearing on livelihood, or under the quickening influence of 
immediate reward, or in the friction of the workshop, they become even 
bright. I would not let a child off one hour of school life merely for the 
sake of an industry. Industries were, after all, made for men, not men 
for industries. But I should give generous remission after fourteen 
to those who showed no special aptitude for book-learning or any other 
form of direct education, on condition that they were kept within the spell 
of corporate life and in touch with teachers capable of undermining the 
outworks of suspicious pride and of sounding reverently the abysmal deeps 
of personality. For these great purposes music, literature and art, dramatic, 
pictorial, and manual, must be called on to give generous help. 
Again, we should beware of the morbid fear of genius being wasted. I 
doubt if genius has ever been wasted. It defies alike the neglect of states- 
men, the over-carefulness of teachers, even the cramping circumstances of 
daily life. Ability, an even more robust plant, gets now a very good chance 
of being recognised, True, the owner’s want of character, his or her parents’ 
want of means or of will, often involve sterility after recognition. The 
State can step in to make good in some measure the want of means; it 
is we, the teachers, who are challenged to fortify the character. Further, 
ability when handicapped neither by poverty nor by innate feebleness 
may not always develop in quite the way that we, with our ideas of 
success, would think best for it. I am not sure that a man may not 
do society a richer service as a Trade Union leader, after graduating 
as an artisan, or even as a lover of knowledge in a W.E.A. class, whilst 
still doing manual labour, than he would have done had he been enrolled 
betimes in the black-coated brigade. Some risk of waste must be run 
unless we are to go over and over again the heaps of rejected human 
material. Let the warp be generously planned, but do not let it be so intri- 
cate in its aims, or so relentless in its working, so unerring, so infallible, 
as to make us at any time confident that it cannot be improved and that 
those who escape it are failures. 
Again, may I plead that all who are occupied with schools as teachers, 
or administrators, or, and especially, as theorists, will recognise more 
fully than they have done show truly educated are many who have escaped, 
as may be thought prematurely, from the definite influences of school ? 
The agricultural labourer, with his knowledge of and often tender sym- 
pathy with animal life, his watchings of the seasons, his weather lore, his 
skill, his beautiful skill, in building or thatching the rick, his power to 
drive a straight line with the plough, his ability by wise, almost ruthless, 
severity to fortify the quickset hedge, is a better-educated man, even 
though he left the school-room at thirteen, than many a clerk who 
suffered complete immersion in a secondary school course, and, satisfied 
with the benefits of his baptism, has since then only become a little more 
skilled in figures and filing. 
I have mentioned the agricultural labourer, but the shipwright and 
the sailor too, to think only of the dwellers in this Hampshire where we . 
meet, can, I think, consider the educating value of their work as some 
compensation for their too short school-days. These would come out well 
if we applied to them only the test that I shall stoutly condemn as the sole 
