understood that they do some introduce compulsory military sort of national service in training into continuation return. In the public schools schools." We are easily perthere is not the smallest show suaded to believe this, and of reluctance to serve the we hope, for the sake of the country. The O.T.C. is of scrupulous Government, that universal acceptance. But it will never be whispered in what is good enough for the the ear of the "young persons boys of Eton and Harrow is that England has been at war. held to be disastrous for the boys who attend elementary schools. The mere hint that it is sweet and comely to fight for their country must be kept from these tender spirits. With incredible carelessness Mr Fisher had given the local education authority "power to include in their schemes military training or drill for young persons between the ages of 14 and 18, who would be compulsorily required to attend continuation schools." We have been four years at war. We should by this time have learned that it is not wholly useless for boys to acquire some knowledge of military drill. We should not have been so long in beating the Germans if military drill had been permitted in our schools. After all, there is nothing disgraceful in learning the rudiments of defence and attack. As a member of the House was bold enough to assert, "the training of Boy Scouts is distinctly a form of military training." But the Boy Scouts are nothing to the Government, and Mr Fisher refused to be led away by an evil example. So he gave "a satisfactory assurance that there was no desire on the part of the Government to

There also Mr Fisher proved himself a born parliamentarian. A man who believes "it would be unfortunate if it should be thought that the Government were attempting to introduce anything like compulsory military training into our schools" might have been born and bred in the House of Commons. We hope that he will carry his seruple a step further, and insist that his teachers should speak always of Swedish exeroises, not of Swedish drill. The word "drill" savours of militarism, and if the boys and girls, who are born into the world for the sole purpose of voting at the proper time and on the right side, accustomed their ears to the sound of so dangerous a word as "drill," it is dimly possible that the next war might find us not wholly unprepared. The democracy might even become interested in national defence, and then not even Viscount Haldane would be able to withstand its clamour. However, all's well that ends well, and our young democrats of both sexes will be as closely guarded against the contamination of military drill and "Chauvinism," its natural result, as though they were conscientious objectors.

Henceforth, then, from the age of five to fourteen wholly, and partially from the age of fourteen to eighteen, the children of the working classes will belong to the State. They will be fed and taught as the State wills, and if only they were put into uniform they might as well be living in reformatories. That the working classes should approve of this servile policy is astonishing enough, and yet they appear to support Mr Fisher's Bill with a whole heart. Now the basis of every strong State is the family, and it is the family and the responsibility which it brings with it that the Government has set itself to destroy. Nor is the paradox mitigated by the reflection that at the very moment when they declare themselves ready to give up their children of five years of age to the public custody, the working classes demand to take into their own hands the sole and undivided government of the Empire. How shall a man rule a great State who declines to manage his own household? How shall we dare to talk of freedom when we have put into the chains of a compulsory and undefined system of education all the "young persons" in the land?

ation falls most heavily. The result will be that the middle class will find the education of its own children, which it has always undertaken itself, inoreasingly difficult. And this difficulty is the more to be deplored, because from the middle class, independent and self-supporting as it is, comes much of the best talent and the best intelligence of the country. This hardship cannot be exaggerated. The middle class, often worse paid than the working class, which rules us to-day by force of numbers, will be asked to pay for the education of children whose parents are perfectly well able to pay for it themselves. Thus the burden will be put upon the wrong shoulders; the continuation schools will be supported by those who do not frequent them; and the best profit that the country can hope to extract from them will be the fines levied upon the young defaulters, five shillings for the first, and a pound for any subsequent offence.

Nor is the Education Department likely to stay its hand at the continuation schools. Its aim is nothing less than to take hold of all the schools and universities in the land. All the parents in England are to be dragooned as the working classes wish to be dragooned to-day. The House of Commons has passed a clause which will prevent a parent from sending his sons to any school which the Board must be wrung from the of Education does not deem middle class, upon which tax- efficient. Eton or Harrow or

And education, thus freely given, must be paid for, and here we are faced by a second injustice. The bulk of the money, which will be spent upon the training of the children of the working classes,

Charterhouse may easily fall vades the book, and a little under the ban, and few will explanation_might have disbelieve the Board of Education pelled it. However, we must are fair judges of efficiency. e'en take it as it comes, and The strength of England in admit that William Hickey the past has been that she was an engaging ruffian, who has had schools and univer- has earned our gratitude by sities of many types. Thus painting a portrait of himself we have found men who could in which nothing is saorificed perform the widely differ- to diffidence or modesty. ing duties imposed by the governance of a large empire. If the ambition of the Board of Education be not checked we shall all be shaped and inspected to a single pattern. We shall all learn the same thing at the same hour, and be fit only to obey the unreasonable behests of a nicely engineered majority. We shall think alike and act alike, and instead of going and coming freely as we please, we shall be packed into whitewashed buildings provided by the Government, and there we shall sit, like Peter Bell's party, "all "all silent and all damned."

The 'Memoirs of William Hickey,' of which a second volume has just been published (London: Hurst & Blackett), deserve more careful editing than they have received. We have a right to be told something more about their ingenious author than the editor has told us. We have a right to ask precise questions about the manuscript, whose pedigree apparently goes back only to 1865, and to see a specimen reproduced in facsimile. As it is, an air of mystery per

He wrote his memoirs long after the events which they chronicle, and they lack the precision of a journal kept from day to day. Otherwise we might describe Hickey as a Pepys of the eighteenth century. He has something of Pepys's candour and Pepys's lack of self-consciousness. He gives himself away with the same light-heartedness wherewith he gives away his friends. His standard of honour is not high, and he makes no pretence that he is any better than he is. He steals money from his respectable father, a friend of Burke, and the "blunt, pleasant creature" of Goldsmith's 'Retaliation,' as gladly as he robs his friend of his mistress. Throughout his life he kept the worst of good company, and was most intimately at home in the taverns and gambling-hells of Londen. Drury Lane was his favourite quarter, though in later years he did not disdain the masquerades which Mme. Cornelys arranged in Soho Square. And though, when he chose his own companions, they were rather cheerful than wise, fortune threw him continually among the great. His book contains sketches the more valuable

perhaps because they appear select the companions of his to be drawn without intention revels. If we may believe -of Burke and Francis and Hickey, Henry Mordaunt, my Warren Hastings, and many Lord Peterborough's brother, another distinguished or noto- was an unredeemed scoundrel, rious statesman. And Hickey mad, brutal, and unscrupulous; is no hero-worshipper. He yet Hickey, who hated him, bends the knee to nobody. could no more easily avoid his Whoever it be that crosses his society than Mordaunt could path, he meets him upon equal avoid the society of Hickey, terms, and keeps himself in- whom he cordially detested, and genuously in the centre of the who at last carried off from picture, as though he was him the beautiful Charlotte rather conferring than accept- Barry. Truly, the bottle which ing a favour. He has all the makes odd companions never lighter vices. He is raffish, brought together an odder rowdy, extravagant, unserup- couple than William Hickey ulous in money and in love, and Henry Mordaunt. and yet he defies the censor in his book as he defied most censors, except that "special attorney," his father, during his life.

It is characteristic of him that, as he sat down in middle age to compose his 'Memoirs,' he remembered with the greatest pride and vividness his triumphs with the bottle. Never once was he unresponsive to the challenge. He would drink with any one who was ready to sit late and to drink deep. In his hot youth champagne and burgundy seem to have caught his palate. Grown to manhood, he preferred claret, and if we numbered the bottles which he says that he drank in his second volume, the result would be astonishing. If he falls in the encounter, he confesses defeat like a man. He speaks almost as tenderly of the headaches, the proper consequence of his debauches, as of the debauches themselves, Nor is he careful always to

In the second volume of his 'Memoirs' Hickey carries his reader abroad with him to the West and East Indies. And if he changes his sky he does not change his mind. The hottest climate neither checks his zest of life nor moderates his appetites. The pursuit of law, which seems in India to have been profitable enough, was but an interlude in his life of busy amusement. And yet he finds time to paint, after his summary fashion, the great men whom he encountered. He speaks familiarly of Hastings and Impey. He agrees with the rest of the world that Francis was a pompous fellow, the more readily because he replied to Burke's letter of introduction that the idea "of his ever having it in his power to be useful to an attorney" was ridiculous; and he notes with pleasure the litigation in which Francis was involved with George Francis Grand, the husband of a famous lady, to

whom Francis was attached, India, where he hoped that

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons.