THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE in 



tions of detail into which it is unnecessary to enter 

 further. 



Last, but not least, comes the question of providing 

 the machinery for enabling those who are by nature 

 specially qualified to undertake the higher branches of 

 industrial work, to reach the position in which they may 

 render that service to the community. If all our edu- 

 cational expenditure did nothing but pick one man of 

 scientific or inventive genius, each year, from amidst 

 the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and give him 

 the chance of making the best of his inborn faculties, 

 it would be a very good investment. If there is one 

 such child among the hundreds of thousands of our an- 

 nual increase, it would be worth any money to drag him 

 either from the slough of misery, or from the hotbed of 

 wealth, and teach him to devote himself to the service 

 of his people. Here, again, we have made a beginning 

 with our scholarships and the like, and need only follow 

 in the tracks already worn. 



The programme of industrial development briefly set 

 forth in the preceding pages is not what Kant calls a 

 "Hirngespinnst," a cobweb spun in the brain of a 

 Utopian philosopher. More or less of it has taken 

 bodily shape in many parts of the country, and there 

 are towns of no great size or wealth in the manufactur- 

 ing districts (Keighley, for example) in which almost 

 the whole of it has, for some time, been carried out, so 

 far as the means at the disposal of the energetic and 

 public-spirited men who have taken the matter in hand 

 permitted. The thing can be done; I have endeavoured 

 to show good grounds for the belief that it must be 

 done, and that speedily, if we wish to hold our own in 

 the war of industry. I doubt not that it will be done, 

 whenever its absolute necessity becomes as apparent to 



