The aim of the Association is neither technical, i.e., to make workmen better qualified for their special work, nor to attain a higher general education with a view to their obtaining employment of a different class and ceasing to be manual workers.  It is to enable them, while continuing to earn their living by manual work, to participate in the fuller life given by intellectual activity.  There are some subjects which can be pursued and studied thoroughly with pleasure and profit without any long or exact preliminary training.  With some wise guidance in reading and some stimulating criticism to help him, the workman can really obtain all that is important from the study of the literature of his own language—­to learn to know and to enjoy the best that has been written.  It is of no importance that he will probably not become a “literary expert,” able to trace the influence of this or that obscure writer of one age or country on the literature of another.  It is to be hoped that he will not learn the kind of literary jargon affected by so many modern critics, or attempt in his essays to imitate those who think that obscurity indicates profundity.  There are some sciences, too, especially certain branches of natural science, which can be pursued by men whose time is mainly taken up by manual work.

The idea of erecting an educational ladder by which all will proceed from the elementary to the secondary school and thence to the University, is a false one.  Any such ladder must continue to be narrow at the top.  It is impossible in any economic conditions that we are likely to see in our time that the majority of our people will be able to devote their whole lives to study until the age at which a University course can be finished.  Indeed, for all classes there is a modern tendency to prolong the school period unduly, to keep boys under the discipline and following the methods of the secondary school until nineteen years of age, so that they finish a University course, which is also becoming more prolonged, after twenty-three, and then at last take up their vocational training.  Neither parents nor the nation can afford to make such a course the normal one.  It is no doubt of the greatest importance to secure a career for special talent so that poverty shall not prevent a really able boy or girl following such a course of study as would enable his or her talents to have their full scope.  The old Grammar Schools, especially in the North of England, afford many examples of poor boys who by means of their school and University scholarships were enabled to obtain the best training the country could give, and so attain the highest positions in Church and State.  These must necessarily be the few.  It is a cruelty by means of scholarships to tempt those who have neither the financial means nor exceptional talent to try for a career in which there will really be no opening for them.  Even with the limited number of scholarships which local