dull and uninspiring; never have they taken the lead in discovering and encouraging the real leaders of men upon the teaching staffs. Inspectors too, in a word, would be made to understand the meaning of education-the training of the mind, the body and the spirit. They would be instructed to render all reports upon individuals with that definition clearly before their minds, and to keep informed every master, and particularly every headmaster, within their jurisdiction of their instructions.

It would be quite possible so to arrange things that every headmaster in the country within a limited period of time passed through a school founded upon the same policy as the Senior Officers' School at Aldershot, which I have described. It would be certainly practicable to insist that every assistant master who aspired to be a headmaster should pass through such a school. A wise Minister would economise in any direction to ensure that such a school should be staffed by the brightest, liveliest and most inspiring spirits available. A wise Parliament would grant the necessary funds. A wise young man, offered the chance of attending, would seize his opportunity with both his hands.

Quite apart, however, from schools for headmasters, the whole problem of training teachers—who hold of course the master-key— would be tackled with vigour. It would be necessary to offer prizes sufficiently substantial to attract the best of the manhood of the nation to the task of training the trainers. Effort would be concentrated, in a word, upon the task of inspiring those whose life task subsequently it would be to inspire. Anything less inspiring than the present institutions-unless it be to become an active disciple of Monsieur Lenin-can hardly be imagined. Quite apart from the fact that the real ideal of the teacher is not at the moment impressed upon the minds of the would-be learners, there appears to be no recognition of the fact that the main function of these places is to inspire. Ugly and gloomy, controlled too often by the dull and unimaginative, they depress rather than elevate, and make no real contribution to the task of rearing a live, happy and vigorous manhood.

Much could be done if the controlling Minister realised the possibilities of his office and was sufficiently vigorous and capable to give effect to a rightly conceived ideal. This presupposes a House of Commons alive to its duties and responsibilities. It is obvious that no one man dare attempt reforms so drastic as those entailed without even an indication from Parliament, although it may be confidently asserted that they do not necessarily entail an increased education vote. It would entail a largely increased expenditure on the early training of teachers. There is, however, abundance of room for economy in other directions. Nor would the attempt be crowned with complete success unless

the general public co-operated in what must be a national effort.

The problem is, of course, twofold: firstly, to attract the best type of man to the teaching profession; and secondly, to ensure that the teacher, inspired and educated, concentrates his efforts upon the right direction. The public must take a hand, because unless and until there is an alteration in the general attitude towards teachers it will not be possible to attract to the profession a reasonably good pick of the manhood of the nation. Without that no effort can succeed to the full. It is not a case of money. The teacher is as well paid on the whole as the officer in the Army or Navy. The one, however, is treated, such is our amazing folly, as a kind of social outcast, the other as a member of the Service and a socially desirable person. Let me give an illustration. A young man from Oxford or Cambridge, a good all-round athlete and possibly a second-class Honours man, is attracted to the teaching profession mainly by the fact that no capital is required-there is no premium to pay. With the assistance of agents, he secures a post in a grammar school and finds himself in a small country town. He soon discovers that he ranks lower in the social scale than the local attorney; indeed, the latter will consider that he is giving him a 'leg-up' if he invites him to supper on Sunday evening once a month. When he has been in residence a year or so the village Squire, whose taste in literature possibly inclines to Victoria Cross or Ethel Dell, may conceivably invite him to lunch. He would, however, consider it something approaching social sacrilege to ask him to dinner. The vicar may press him to teach in his Sunday-school. He will not, however, exhibit the same anxiety to take him to the bosom of his family. Is it too much to hope that if a real effort were made to attract the best of our young manhood to the profession the task of improving its social status-even in the country -would not prove insuperable? This particular difficulty is, of course, one of the main obstacles at the present time.

It will be interesting to observe the new Minister. If he were bold enough to make an attempt on the lines I have indicated, he would more than possibly meet with a surprising response from the country. He has a model ready at hand. Strong, intelligent, modest and spiritual in the best sense of the word, he is himself a living embodiment of what education, training and environment can produce. Will he make an attempt to ensure that even our poorest children upon a smaller scale have some of those opportunities the advantage of which he is a standing illustration?

C. E. LOSEBY.

HOUSEKEEPING AND UNEMPLOYMENT

FOR fine, confused economic thinking it must be difficult to beat a General Election. Arguments-good, bad, and indifferent— hurtle through the air, and are cast upon the slightly deafened ears of the electors. At the end of it all, after we have read the papers and heard all the speeches and listened to all the canvassers-who, poor things, like the well-known organist, 'do their best,' though, unlike him, they are not afraid of being shot if they annoy-we are probably much where we were before we began. We have mostly complained of the Government for what it either did or did not do, and we shall no doubt continue so to complain-of the new Government and of any and all Governments. It is one of the reasons why we have Governments. But many of us are not content with this form of activity. We are conscious of our economic troubles, anxious to think out their real causes, anxious to know if our own daily spendings or savings, our own habits of life, matter except to ourselves, whether what we and our friends are accustomed to do or to leave undone has any bearing upon the whole, and, if so, what? Are there any public rights and wrongs about our use of our incomes ?-if, indeed, in these hard times we are fortunate enough to possess incomes at all. We have as a rule a fairly clear general idea that it is wrong to be extravagant, and undesirable to be miserly. But what is extravagance, and where does prudence end and 'meanness '-word beloved in some circles-begin? It is all puzzling, but we have a feeling that there are answers, if we could but find them.

During the war years we went to war-savings meetings and heard explanations which seemed to throw light upon our difficulties. We realised that if we spent we could not save, which was an old and familiar truth, but we learnt also to translate it into the facts of life as they concerned us then. We understood that we must keep ourselves and our families fit and well, because if we were ill we used the time and energies of hard-pressed doctors, and even if we were not ill, but only ailing or below par, we could not get through the work of which there was so much to do. So that the first call upon our incomes was to keep ourselves, and those dependent upon us, as efficient as it was possible to be.

Nor was that an easy task for the worried housekeeper in those days of grinding anxiety, strain, and 'substitutes.' But we learnt more than that. We learnt to plan and to contrive, and to think and to arrange, so that we could not only keep ourselves and our belongings up to the mark, but save too, because we realised that the saving, which had not always been, to say the least of it, the most fashionable of virtues among a good many of us, really meant something. It meant that the spending power we refrained from using could be lent to the Government and could be turned into equipment and munitions. Munitions meant-and how easily we understood it—the chance of saving lives. Equipment and comforts meant lives too. We gladly gave up buying things and services which we had been accustomed to take for granted in order that the labour that would have been employed upon them might be released for munitions and other war services. The old, and it is to be feared usually unpopular, lessons of the economists, that there is a difference between ' unproductive' and 'productive' expenditure, that there is such a thing as economic waste, that spending does not create a demand for work, but does determine what sort of work shall be doneall these ideas gradually, and perhaps often rather incompletely, got into the minds of the ordinary woman, whose business it is to do the family spending. Are they still in her mind, or has she forgotten them, and does she once more believe that 'luxury is good for trade'? The efforts of Sir Eric Geddes and the economy Press have probably made her think that Government expenditure is a dangerous and undesirable thing. Can she get beyond this and realise the difference, not only in the expenditure of the Government, or the local education authority, or the borough council, but also in her own expenditure, between what is productive and what is from the economic point of view waste?

No one can honestly suppose that this is easy; but is it possible? Can we say to ordinary women, not only the few who are well off, but the many who live comfortably according to their standards, whether in a cottage, a villa, or a mansion, that there is a line to be drawn between spending which helps solution of our appalling problem of unemployment and spending which, in the long run, hinders that solution? Ought we, perhaps, to say to them something like this?

What the mass of people wish to buy determines what is to be made. Each little buying may make hardly any difference by itself, but all the mass of buyings makes all the difference. If we spend upon things, or upon services, which we do not really need, that is upon things or services without which we should be just as well and just as efficient, then capital and work go into the business of providing whatever those unnecessaries are and

are not available in other ways. This means that capital and work have been used in a manner that does not increase the sum total of efficiency, and that if they had not been so used they might have been available for the creation of fresh forms of wealth, or for the making of something of which there is not yet enough. We have to distinguish between the long run and the short run, between the things seen, which are so obvious, and the things unseen, which are often so much more important.

It is apparent that whatever we spend must, in the first instance, employ labour; the difficulty is to think what happens after that. Wealth used economically should mean a continued employment of labour, a continuous growth of wealth. Wealth used uneconomically comes to an end after it is once spent. It uses, employs, one lot of labour, but no more. Luxury, in other words-if we define luxury as something, anything, which does not make us any more useful or healthy, or, in one word, efficientmeans economic waste. It means the use of spending power in a way that, after one use, destroys that spending power.

But what is luxury? Here we are bound to get into difficulties, if only for the excellent reason that it is almost impossible to decide, hard even to understand, what another person needs. To the man who is out all day a quiet sitting-room, away from the noises of the street or the kitchen or the children, may well be luxury. To the man, or for the matter of that to the woman, who does brain work at home it is an absolute necessity, and not only the room, but all that it means in the way of extra lighting and heating and cleaning. However, if we determine to brace ourselves to honesty, most of us know pretty well what is essential to us and what is not. For some it may be chocolate, for others tobacco or alcohol, or clothes, or theatres or concerts, or motoring-all, no doubt, useful and desirable, but all, so frail are we, likely to be used in excess of what our natures and avocations demand for maximum efficiency. We can all judge for ourselves, though it is much more amusing, and involves much less moral and mental effort. to judge for other people. Other people are, however, very unlikely to approve our judgment or to act upon it, whereas if we devote the necessary and perhaps exhausting effort to ourselves there may be some result.

If, then, we can decide that spending upon things or services which are not essential to our efficiency, that is to our making the best use of ourselves according to our abilities and avocations and our walk in life, means economic waste, we have arrived at something. We have realised that every time we buy anything we are helping to guide capital and labour into certain channels. If those channels lead directly or indirectly to the creation of fresh wealth, the result is economic progress. If, on the other