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VI
OUR DOMESTIC FUTURE
101

renowned scientists, plan, from the retorts and microscopes of their laboratories, campaigns against nature and the conquest of the commercial world.

Nevertheless, though Germany may be said to have outdistanced us at several points in this department, we need not definitely adopt sackcloth, or pour ashes too indiscriminately upon our head. Since 1902 we have begun to wrestle with our own problem, and there is no doubt that we are making considerable way. The main necessity of the time is not merely to organise secondary education as a thing apart, but to link it to primary education by some device which will induce our youth to remain within the circuit of instruction, instead of abruptly quitting it. To the achievement of this end something has been already contributed. One of the more hopeful innovations of our time has been the remodelling of our secondary schools, together with the provision by local authorities of organised scholarships. Schemes, enabling promising pupils from public elementary schools to proceed to the next stage of instruction, are backed by the regulations of the Board of Education, making it a condition of increased grants offered to secondary schools that a proportion of free places, ordinarily one - quarter, should be reserved in each school for pupils from elementary schools. Thus the bulk of the State-aided secondary schools are now under effective control, and are open, as regards a certain number of places, without payment of fee, to children from the public