as get a chance to consider it. So the discovery of the new order of schools is at the mercy of every wind that blows. It is no more ours than is the bird who alights on the window-sill, and who then, startled by her own arrival, flies away before we welcome her.
But now a word of these new ventures—the schools themselves.
The pioneer one was founded, it appears, in Moscow, in 1868, by Dellavos. Prince Kropotkin gives some account of its methods in his Fields, Factories, and Workshops. It was a school quite in the ordinary sense of the word, taking in boys at the age of fourteen, after an examination such as is represented by our "leaving certificate." Only this school became a real industrial centre at the top. It merged into a genuine part of the industrial and financial world. The boys were "finished" by becoming bona fide wage-earners, competing in the open market with highly skilled workmen, making with their own hands "electric machines, steam engines (from the heavy boiler to the last finely turned screw), agricultural machinery, and scientific apparatus."
Just as the youth at Oxford tests himself by speaking and writing in public, the youth of the