brought into contact with its industrial needs, by an easy transition the oversight of technical and industrial education in all its phases was confided to this ministry, and a complete service of inspection was established, both of industry and of trade instruction. Since 1891 the organization and inspection of all the housekeeping schools grafted on the public school system, as well as of independent institutions for domestic training and trade instruction, have been turned over to the same department, and the official force of inspectors includes both women and men.

The fact that the state organizes and aids public instruction, that there is one enlightened head, one policy, one system of inspection with a very high standard, instead of many independent superintend ents with different policies, conduces not a little to the excellence and practical utility of industrial teaching in this progressive nation. At the same time full play is afforded for private munificence, initiative, and experiment. Every man's system is given a fair trial, his pet ideas free scope. The government merely strengthens where private hands are weak, guides where they are inexperienced, supplies omissions, and supervises firmly but not offensively.

Special, industrial, and technical instruction in Belgium may be classified as follows:

I. Apprenticeship schools and ouvroirs, or workshop and school combined. These were established as charities, and are diminishing in number and importance.

II. Agricultural and horticultural schools, and schools for training dairy maids.

III. Girls' housekeeping schools, rapidly developing, over 250 having already been established.

IV. Trade schools for girls, of which all the principal cities now boast one or more.

V. Parochial trade schools, those of Saint Luke being the highest type.

VI. Trade schools supported by guilds and trade unions, such as the brewers' and tailors' schools.

VII. Trade schools having day classes and shop work. Their design is to fit for a trade and to do away with the often misdirected drudgery of apprenticeship.

VIII. Large industrial schools, sometimes combined with drawing schools, sometimes separate, where classes are held in the evenings and on Sundays and where the course is widely eclectic.

IX. Drawing schools, existing in every town of any size in the kingdom.

X. Commercial schools, the most important of which is at Antwerp, with the object to prepare accountants, merchants, consular and commercial agents for home and consular service.

XI. Schools of industry and mines, highly scientific in character.

These confer the much esteemed degree of engineer, and correspond in a measure to our institutes of technology. The new Technical Institute of Electricity given by M. Montefiore-Levi to the city of Liege ranks in this category.

The aim of technical and industrial schools in Belgium is trade proficiency rather than all-around education. They are designed to train the artisan rather than to develop the man. Apprentices, workingmen, and would-be workers awaiting employment attend these industrial courses to increase their own technical efficiency in the trades they are already following or mean to adopt, and also with the hope of improving their chance of obtaining better occupation at those pursuits in a labor market seriously overcrowded. Although joint instruction, mental and manual, is generally provided, the mental is usually sacrificed or at least subordinated to the manual; and it is intended not so much to add to the pupil's sum of knowledge in all lines as to aid and develop his capacity in his present or future calling. Considered as mere trade schools, it is their strong point that time is not lost in acquiring facts which have no bearing on the life work. Considered as educational factors, however, these great industrial institutions are sometimes called narrow and one sided. In their favor the fact should be emphasized that a great variety of teaching in all branches is offered, courses as purely theoretical and scientific as American colleges afford. The workingman or student in any walk of life who chooses to attend night school during six, eight, even ten years-and some men study twelve and fifteen years-gets a very comprehensive literary and scientific as well as industrial course. Degrees are given, however, after three and four years for proficiency in any one branch or course, and the majority of pupils frequent the school no longer after winning the certificate they set out to gain. A great many young men, many men of mature years, indeed, take course after course, and degree after degree, after having succeeded in mastering the branch which will best serve in their chosen occupation or life work-an occupation seldom changed in the stable and conservative social order and traditions which distinguish the Belgian people.

In many provinces the age of admission to industrial schools of the higher grade is 12 and 13 years, and the course of instruction is meant to make up to the pupil workman for his lack of further public school tuition. Institutions of the most advanced standards he enters at 15 or 16, and the book work he accomplishes is always less than that prescribed in public schools of similar grades, for drawing and practical applications take up much time.

The money to support the industrial, art, trade, and special schools in Belgium is derived from various sources. The government subsidizes nearly all these institutions freely, thus acquiring the right to inspect them, and also, to a limited degree, to impose special lines of study or curtail others. The communes or counties, besides, contribute funds,

and usually the city as well, sometimes more liberally than the others. In some towns the educational institutions, of whatever kind they may be, are maintained wholly by certain districts (communes); and these communes, instead of duplicating by means of poorly equipped schools in their own midst the great central or special schools, wisely content themselves with giving scholarships in the latter to deserving students. Molenbeek and Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode at Brussels boast that no boy or girl within their limits need go without the best special training the kingdom affords, the commune bearing the pupil's expenses while in attendance at the university or art and trade classes not provided by the commune itself. In Liege, in Verviers, in Brussels, the municipality assists even the most heterogeneous educational ventures, giving a room or building, furnishing teachers, supplying books and materials to be used by the cooking and sewing classes, and even aiding an enterprise not entirely educational, like the working girls' clubs, to which Brussels presents a vacation purse of 500 francs ($96.50).

A remarkable feature of Belgian industrial education and worthy of all emulation is that many firms and industrial establishments, impressed with the need of having better trained workmen, and actuated by motives of genuine philanthropy, create and support technical and special schools. The large and admirably managed industrial school at Morlanwelz was founded and is partly maintained by M. Arthur Warocqué, owner of the neighboring mines of Mariemont and Bascoup. The course of study comprises general branches useful to all workers and, in addition, special instruction bearing on mines and mining. At Seraing the great Cockerill iron works, spending nearly 200,000 francs ($38,600) a year in advancing the welfare of its operatives by means of hospitals, societies, and pensions, also supports in great part, without monopolizing, the flourishing Seraing industrial school. The company is, moreover, making a unique experiment-that of teaching the young boys over 12 years of age employed in their coal mines, so that they may not forget the instruction gained in the primary schools. The lads stop work at 4 p. m. and go at once to the school for two or three hours, learning enough to keep their minds active and thus counteract the stultifying effects of their toil. This same firm maintains at Hoboken, near Antwerp, an important industrial school, modified to the requirements of the ship building trade pursued in their shops (chantiers)-at Hoboken. The faience manufacturers at La Louvière have organized a special drawing school which all of their decorators must attend. Indeed, every technical and industrial educational establishment in the kingdom is aided financially by the large firms and employers of labor whose workmen are enrolled as students.

A striking characteristic of industrial training in Belgium is its adaptability to local needs. For example, the industrial school at Soignies, where the chief industry is stone quarrying, strikes out of its curriculum much irrelevant matter that may with propriety be taught in other

industrial schools, such as Brussels, which aim to fit men for a dozen vocations. Soignies, on the contrary, directs its efforts to studies that will be useful to quarrymen, stonecutters, and even stone carvers, the artistic side never being neglected in this land of wonderful ancient architectural monuments. At Ostend, where the fisheries are the predominating industry, a class in fishery has been successfully carried on by a priest, and a special room has been arranged in the public schools as a fisheries museum or workshop, containing all the appliances used in this trade. To this room are brought daily all the sons of fishermen among the 500 pupils in the building, and these boys, probably des tined to a life on the Channel and the North Sea, learn what pertains to that pursuit. The geography of the district is taught by means of ocean and land charts, the use of the compass, the manœuvres of fishermen, the tying of knots and the setting of sails, the forms of sailing boats, the kinds and habits of fish, etc. Of course, the ordinary book work of the grade had to be lessened to make room for this special class. As yet the course is only tentative and applied to boys under 12 years of age, but such interest does it awaken and so successful has it been that the intention is to continue this instruction into the higher grades. Moreover, the large and important industrial school at Ostend is more developed than any other in all teaching which pertains to ship building. Even in the lowest drawing classes the instruction is directed toward that trade. Instead of drawing ordinary machines the pupils draw boats, and though the institution is poorly housed on one of the worst streets of Ostend, it possesses a collection of models and ships that any museum might be proud to own.

At Ghent, too, where cotton and linen are manufactured the teaching in the industrial school conforms to the needs of local industries, and a finely equipped weaving school is maintained, with day and Sunday courses. Each pupil begins with the simplest form of hand loom and learns every process up to the management of the most complicated modern power loom. The combination and analysis of warp and woof in fabrics is studied thoroughly, and those who finish the lessons marked out are fully capable of conducting the business of cotton manufacturing for themselves, or of taking charge of any weaving room and of reproducing any sample. Candidates who wish to master the art of dyeing, with reference to print works and designing, pursue an elaborate chemical course. The sketching of textile machinery, setting it up, and taking it apart are important exercises for such as are or intend to be loom fixers and mill machinists. Nor are women operatives forgotten, special Sunday and evening lessons being provided for darners and burlers, which are shared by tailoresses and dressmakers as well.

What is true of Ghent applies with equal force to Verviers, the classes there being adapted to the woollen industry, and special instruction is carried very far. At Charleroi, with its network of coal seams, the instruction is suited to miners, with technical teaching for those

who work underground. These student workmen walk 5 and 6 miles and back to the Sunday classes; and so indispensable is the training deemed that men have little chance to become boss miners or foremen without holding certificates from the industrial school.

The eclectic character of industrial training in Belgium is another inestimable advantage. For instance, the Flemish peasant, long past his school days and toiling seven days in the week for the necessities of life, may double his opportunities and advance his career by learning French thoroughly in the night classes of the industrial school of his commune. Another gets aid at drawing, mechanics, whatever branch he most needs, without wasting time on non-essentials. The tradesman acquires bookkeeping and commerce, the designer takes an elaborate course of free-hand drawing and modelling, the machinist draws to scale or reproduces machinery in time sketches.

The practice, common to trade and manual training institutions in Belgium, of paying the pupil low market rates for the work accomplished has this good result, that as part of the wages are set aside each week and given the student workman only after he finishes the prescribed programme, he has a fund with which to start in life. This fund enables him sometimes to leave the thronged marts of his native country and seek more remunerative employmont in foreign lands. Expatriation of the graduates of the industrial school at Tournay is almost universal, and most of the ex-pupils occupy positions of trust in other countries.

Payment for the day's weaving in rural apprenticeship schools is an aid to the poorer peasantry and serves to lighten the burden of the bureaus of charity. Apprenticeship schools of this type are numerous in Flanders and are often kept up in connection with parochial schools or convent workshops. The pupils, it is true, learn a trade, and often follow it in after years. Some of these ouvroirs are, however, nothing more than workshops, clean and under good moral influences, where young and inexperienced labor is utilized at low pay; the peasants gladly accepting any stipend in return for having their children under proper care.

The economy with which the technical and industrial schools are administered in Belgium is remarkable. Considering their equipment, the excellent qualifications of the men who compose their faculties, the practical utility of their teaching and the results achieved, the Belgian schools are perhaps the cheapest in existence. The power of organization and administration is conspicuous; the sense of personal responsibility for the use of trust funds is very high; and the interest in education is both unselfish and widespread. More than all, greed for gain is not a ruling spirit. Men realize that there is something better to strive for than mere money getting; and foremost citizens lend their talents and efforts to the cause of education. As a proof of the admir