232 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
will have to receive them for the present. About the part these modern 
schools will play in English education, I hope to say something later. I 
believe that they will very shortly attract in large measure that public 
interest and support without which no type of school can grow freely in 
our soil. Whether they will develop to any large extent courses for 
industry and commerce, between say the ages of fifteen and eighteen, and 
at the end of the general course, or whether these courses will be provided 
in association with the technical schools as a kind of high school accom- 
modated in technical institute buildings, as some of the old organised 
science schools used to be, is a question for the future. I shall have to 
point out presently that outside the secondary school there is very little 
evidence of a demand for voluntary full-time education after the com- 
pulsory age is reached, so that any development of such education towards 
industry and commerce is bound to be gradual. 
The inquirer approaching the subject of instruction for industry a 
commerce cannot fail to be struck by the unsystematic—almost hap- 
hazard—manner in which facilities appear to be disposed. It is only in 
a few large and highly industrialised areas that one finds evidence of 
constructive planning. Over a large part of the country the field is 
occupied, though not covered, by a medley of institutions which often 
have little relation one to another. The local school of art will probably 
have no connection with the technical college : as likely as not the com- 
mercial school or department will be quite independent of the industrial 
departments of the college ; yet surely design has an important place in 
industry, and what is commerce essentially but the exchange of the 
products of industry? Again, the institutions themselves overlap to a 
surprising extent. The official titles—technical school, technical college, 
evening institute, and so on—afford no certain clue to the range and 
standard of the instruction which is given in them. 
This state of affairs is partly an inheritance from the early nineties of 
last century, when the nation was aroused chiefly by the extraordinary 
expansion of German trade, though the reports of Commissions and 
Committees played their part in the awakening, to the need for more 
and better commercial and technical training, and insisted that something 
must be done. Under the national impetus technical instruction made 
a fresh start. The municipalities and the counties were constituted 
authorities by the Technical Instruction Act of 1889, with rating powers, 
and were encouraged to get to work by Exchequer grants of nearly a 
million pounds out of the Local Taxation (Customs and Excise) Account, 
popularly known as the whiskey money, which were applied to this purpose 
as an afterthought on the part of Parliament. Many of the municipalities 
hastened to erect technical colleges, sometimes with no very precise ideas 
about the character and extent of the instruction which they were going 
to provide, enthusiasm usurping the place of a careful survey of existing 
provision and of local needs. 
The present confusing position is also in part a consequence of the 
lines on which our educational system is organised. In most continental 
countries technical instruction is a function of the State, and can be 
planned on a national basis, or at least on the basis of large provinces 
