Welsh Journals

and of preparation for his future work. To accom- plish this, the Labour Exchanges will have to be brought into much closer touch with juvenile labour, so that the Juvenile Exchange with its advisory committees will become the chief means for organising the demand and conditions of juvenile labour. Juvenile Trade Boards-an excellent suggestion- should, too, be set up to enforce a standard of instruction, of wages and of general conditions. In this manner the worst employers could at least be attracted towards the standard of the better. The general welfare of the young employee will be looked after by the extension and re-organisation of the duties of the after-care committees. For this purpose, the control of the education authorities over young persons should continue until the age of eighteen. Mr. Dearie suggests, also, the abolition of street trading, the street regulation and limitation of employment out of school hours and the raising of the school leaving age from fourteen to fifteen years. The other remedy is bound up with the difficult question of industrial education. In England it is the practice to assign to the Board of Trade the task of organising and supervising the conditions of labour and its demand to the education authority that of preparing and sorting the supply. But the education authority has also the wider duty of the preparation of these boys for future citizenship. It can and does do much. Already, boys are carefully graded according to rough standards for the various trades by their teachers, and psychological research is materially assisting in providing a truer basis for selection. This, however, means a much greater interference with industry than at present exists. Accordingly, some systematic organisation of training will have to be developed in the workshops them- selves. From this will arise the gradual evolution of regular systematic methods applied and adapted to the different trades. On the other hand, an ex- tension of the organisation of education is at present, inevitable. Here Mr. Dearie looks first to an extension of the Continuation and Trade Schools with compulsory attendance at them until the age WE have pleasure in announcing that in our next number we shall publish a striking new poem by Mr. T. GWYNN JONES entitled Tir Na'n Og. It deals with an old Irish myth, in the metre of the awdl and in the form of a drama. Critics who have read the poem regard it as one of the finest works of the author, end we are sure its appearance will be welcomed by all lovers of Welsh literature. of eighteen, and second, to the development of a certain industrial bias in the elementary school. This bias will then form the basis for the Central Schools which prepare for general industrial and commercial work. With the former, as a method for meeting an existing evil, we are in complete agree- ment. The latter, however, is fraught with con- siderable difficulty. To the elementary school will certainly be assigned the duty of grading and classi- fying the boys for the Continuation Schools and Labour Exchanges. The introduction of an indus- trial bias into the curriculum is a matter which should be outside the scope of the elementary school. Its duty is to train citizens not workers. Such are some of the measures suggested, and in many cases adopted to provide for a phase of industrial progress which there is, happily, every ground to believe is a passing one. Naturally, a book such as this does not deal with the much more vital problem of the necessity for adolescent or juvenile labour. After all, technical education is, in the main, an attempt to mitigate a social evil arising out of the unorganised nature of industrial conditions. There are hopeful signs that this evil can be met, not by palliatives which may scotch the snake but leave its activity unimpaired, but by real effort directed to the proper organisation of industry. The employment of young persons up to eighteen, with no apprenticeship system to guide and care for them, implies cheap labour and wasted lives. There is no inherent reason why industry should recruit its ranks from the young members of society, much less that municipalities and communal effort should have to organise their youth and present them to privately-owned industry as skilled trained workers. Thus the real solution of technical education will have to be sought in the reorganisation of industry in the conception that industry, too, exists not merely to manufacture profits but to manufacture citizens in short, that industry is itself a great educative as well as a great productive force, organised at present purely for profit making, but capable of being or- ganised as one of the best and easiest avenues to citizenship available in the state. Stanley H. Watkfns. TIR NA'N OG