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THE value of popular education has so often been discussed by men who are authorities on the subject that I hesitate to put on record my own point of view. But at any rate I can see the subject from another angle. If every boy who came from a Council school were being prepared for a definite career, it would be a simple matter for the hard-working teachers to train him towards perfection; but the truth is that eighty per cent. of the boys who go through Council schools go forth into the world to swell the ranks of unskilled labour. Their seven or eight years of dreary grind has taught them to read, to write an indifferent hand, and to figure. Within a year of leaving school even a public school boy would find it difficult to qualify for a lower certificate. How much harder is it for the poor boy who leaves a Council school, a place more often than not of unpleasant memories, to utilise the knowledge he has acquired during those seven or eight years! The weary hours he spends securing a working knowledge of the capes and bays of England—knowledge that passes in a flash almost as soon as he has taken a joyous farewell of his school!

I was a fairly intelligent boy, and I am trying to remember now just what I did learn. At geography, roughly the shape of England; nothing about the United States, nothing about the railway systems of Europe. I learnt that China had two great rivers, the Yangtse-kiang and Hoangho, but which is which I can't remember. I knew the shape of Africa and that it was an easy map to draw. I knew nothing about France except that Paris was on the Seine. I knew the shape of Italy was like a top-booted leg, and that India was in the shape of a pear; but except that there had been a mutiny in that country, it was terra incognita to me.

History: The ancient Britons smeared themselves with woad and paddled round in basket-shaped boats. William the Conqueror came to England in 1066. Henry VIII had seven—or was it eight?—wives. King Charles was executed for some obscure reason, and at a vague period of English history there was a War of the Roses.

Chemistry: If you put a piece of heated wire in oxygen—or was it hydrogen?—it glowed very brightly. If you blow through a straw into lime water, the water becomes cloudy.

English Literature: Three plays of Shakespeare which especially appealed to me, and knowledge of which was of the greatest service in after life; an acquaintance with the "Arabian Nights", and one or two poets.

Religion: No more than I learnt at Sunday school.

Drawing: Hours of hard work in an attempt to acquire proficiency in an art for which I had no aptitude.

Arithmetic: As far as decimals. In those days book-keeping was not learnt at school. You might say that all the knowledge I acquired from my lessons in arithmetic was the ability to tot columns of figures with great rapidity.

I think I would undertake to teach in a month more geography than I learnt in six years. Not, I hasten to add, because the teachers were deficient, for we had in "Tubby" Gaines one of the finest head masters that ever went to an elementary school, but because the system is as wrong as it can well be, and hour after hour of time is wasted in inculcating into a class of fifty, knowledge which is of no interest whatever except to possibly two or three.

You have to remember to take into account the attitude not only of the boys but of their parents towards school. To the average poor father and mother, school is a place which occupies a boy's time that otherwise would be spent in making himself a nuisance at home. When he gets a little older, school becomes an interference with the liberty of the subject; the boy is being detained when he ought to be earning his living.

To the average boy, school is a horrible duty, and if there are ever any who do not wake on Monday morning and groan at the prospect of another week's grind, then they are hardly normal. In any case, the time given to popular education is ridiculously inadequate. Twenty-seven and a half hours a week compares very unfavourably with the time spent by a boy at a public school. In my day, games were not encouraged; there was little or no drill, and no break in the morning. School was divided into standards, and the teacher took most of the lessons, though occasionally there was an exchange.

The real trouble with the Council school is that there is no machinery by which continuation classes can be made compulsory. No boy should be given a clearance certificate until, say, he has made himself proficient in one of the modern languages. As matters are at present, a boy leaves school more or less illiterate, with no other qualification than that required for a van or errand boy. But mostly, I think, the real deficiency in the system is that he is not taught to speak. Well acquainted as I am with the peculiar intonation of the street boy, I am frequently at a loss to understand what he is talking about. This stricture not only applies to London, but to the provinces. The horrible articulation of the average Council-trained youth is a terrible handicap to him in after life. Indeed, the only difference that exists between the Council boy and the public school boy is his voice. The nasal whine of the Cockney schoolboy is an offence. And there is really no reason in the world why he should be allowed to go into the world under such a disadvantage.

Eleven years of life passed for me—confused years in which sixpenny pieces and half-hundredweights of coal and Caius Cassius and wagonette drives to Sidcup are inextricably mixed up.

George Freeman's breakings-out are more clearly remembered. There was a sort of routine which began with his return from the market in a more jocular frame of mind, and a morning visit to the "Glengall Arms." And then a visit to the Post Office Savings Bank to withdraw fabulous sums, and then the hire of a wagonette and horse which he drove to Sidcup, where tea was to be had under the elms. Then came a period of deep depression and remorse; a certain harshness of temper, and finally the interminable reading of the Old Testament, glasses perched on his thick nose.

Those "on the drink" periods had their joys and sorrows for me. Money was plentiful—pennies to be had for the asking. There were other times when I sat on the doorstep of the hostel waiting for closing-time and cursing all public-houses that kept me out of bed. The bouts lasted less than a week—he was both a frugal and a cautious man. He carried always in his waistcoat pocket a piece of steel umbrella rib hooked at the end to retrieve his false teeth in case he ever swallowed them.

At ten or thereabouts I became a sort of associate member of a gang of burglars. They stole type from a type-founder's. I never took part in the raids carried out under the direction of a desperado very little older than myself, but I received a little of the loot and regretted that it was not more useful. And about now I met a man who asked me to buy him cigarettes—a penn'orth at a time. He gave me nice new florins and I brought him back the change. After I had changed five, I took the sixth to the nearest policeman and said:

"If you please, sir, is this money snide?"

He broke it with his finger and thumb and said that it was snide. So my employer was pinched, and the magistrate said I was a smart little boy. I kept the News of the World cutting for a long time—it was the first time my name ever appeared in print.

Eleven years passed. I made a suggestion to Mrs. Freeman, which she rejected with indignation.

"Only raggity boys sell newspapers on the streets", she said.

And I wasn't a raggity boy. Nevertheless—I had explored the fascinating part of the City. It begins at St. Paul's and ends at Temple Bar. I was a theatre-goer too—the Surrey and the Elephant and Castle gallery was like home to me. Have I not shed tears over the sorrows of Mrs. Bennett, driven from home by cruel parents and dying in the paper snow. Theatre-going was something of an adventure. It involved saving—on less than sixpence the evening was a failure. The gallery cost fourpence at the Surrey (as against threepence at the Elephant); an extra penny was required for a bottle of ginger-beer and a penny for the tram ride home.

And at home trouble began. A knock at the door... a wait... the sound of feet in the passage.

"Is that you, Dick?"

The door was always locked and bolted against the burglar who never came. God knows what he could have stolen, for Mr. Freeman's savings book was locked in the bottom drawer and he kept a policeman's truncheon hanging to the rail of his bed.

"Yes, mother."

The sound of bolts being pulled and a running commentary on my disgraceful behaviour.

"This time of night... you ought to be ashamed of yourself... you young blackguard!"

There was always a gentle slap awaiting me as I darted through, but I was a nimble dodger.

It was during the summer holidays of 1886 that I began my business career. Unknown to the Freemans, I "went to London" and was initiated into the mysteries of "sale or return." The paper I chose was the Echo, a bilious-looking sheet that was remarkable for its high moral tone and the accuracy of its tips.

On a summer afternoon I appeared outside Cook's office at Ludgate Hill beneath the windows of the very club of which I was one day to be chairman, with a bundle of Echos under my arm. It was an enthralling experience. I stood in the very centre of London. Past me rumbled the horse buses, the drays and wagons of the great metropolis. I saw great men, pointed out to me by a queer old gentleman in a frowsy overcoat and top hat who haunted Ludgate Circus. Sala—Mr. Lawson, who owned the Telegraph, the father of the present Viscount Burnham-Toole, who came occasionally to Fleet Street—Henry Irving driving in a hansom cab with a beautiful lady called Ellen Terry (they were coming from St. Paul's). I was very happy and grateful that I had the opportunity of seeing such people.

Winter came. Attendance at my pitch involved "hopping the wag", a mysterious colloquialism which meant playing truant from school. And in the winter trade was slack. All the cold bitter winds of the world circled madly in Ludgate Circus. It was a shivering, nose-nipping business. I found a novel method of generating heat. As I stamped my feet I recited in a mutter the quarrel scene from Julius Caesar.

CASSIUS: That you have wrong'd me doth appear in this:

You have condemn'd and noted Lucius Pella

For taking bribes hereof the Sardians;

Wherein my letters praying on his side

Because I knew the man, were slighted of.

BRUTUS: You wronged yourself to write in such a case.

How I hated Cassius! How I made him whine and cringe, and how wrathful and indignant I, Brutus, was! Before the end of the scene I was glowing with righteous anger.

Only once was I too vehement. A tall policeman suddenly overshadowed me like a tower of blue.

"What's the matter with you, boy?"

"Nothing, sir", I stammered.

"Light-headed?"

"Yes, sir", I said, thinking that this was rather a cunning explanation.

"You better push orf home then", he said.

I pushed.

My earnings averaged (I guess) about three shillings a week, which I spent in dissipation—ginger-beer, theatres and a succulent toffee called "Devona."

There was Sunday school, of course, and Sunday school introduced me to my first fiction. It was a story called "Christie's Old Organ", over which I have shed many tears. The moral of the story was that one ought to be kind to people less fortunate than oneself. The complex introduced into my mental system by "Christie's Old Organ" has cost me thousands of pounds. I have often wished that I had begun my course of reading with "Jack Sheppard."

My periods of piety began usually in the month of April every year and ended in July. Between those two dates is held the annual Sunday school excursion, and for sixpence (if you are a regular scholar) you can get a day in the country with food thrown in. And you are not a regular scholar unless you have been on the books for a month. In the course of the years I worked almost every Sunday school in the neighbourhood, accumulated a working knowledge of the more picturesque miracles, and had seen the world from Epping Forest to Chislehurst, from Richmond Park to Epping Forest.

The last treat of all was that given by Queen Victoria to the Board school children. I went to Hyde Park labelled, drank sweet lemonade, cheered the wrong lady in the royal procession, and was awarded a Jubilee mug shaped like a truncated cone. I won three others coming home in the train by tossing, but I had to surrender them to the enraged parents who were waiting at Peckham Rye Station to welcome the adventurers home.

The serious business of life began soon after. Paper-selling was low; worse, it was unremunerative. For the first time I sallied forth under my own name—I had to get a copy of my birth certificate to secure my first job.

It was very interesting to be called by a name I'd never used in my life; I felt a little more important, as though the Queen had bestowed a title upon me.

There was a big printing firm in Newington Causeway that wanted a "taker off." The wages were five shillings a week from which, during the first three weeks, five shillings was deducted as a guarantee that the employee would not leave without giving due notice.

From eight o'clock in the morning until five-thirty at night, with an hour for dinner, I stood by a lithographic machine and "took off" paper bags as they were printed. It was rather tiring, but I wore a felt apron and in the course of the day my face grew black. Sometimes when we had gold work to do, my boots were covered with "gold" dust. People could see as I walked homeward that I was one of the world's workers.

I learnt a lot. Why do machinists say "Sy up!" instead of "Stop the machine"? I have never solved that riddle. And I learnt something of usury. There were men and boys on every floor who would lend you fourpence if you returned sixpence on Saturdays. The place was rotten with this form of brigandage. Often of my five shillings I took home two—a goodly proportion of my income having gone in the shape of interest. It goes on still, I believe, and the trade unions could kill it dead, if they moved in the matter.

My parting from this house was a violent one. I stayed away for a day, and a few hours after I had returned I was given the money due to me and told to clear out. I asked for the five shillings deposit and was told it was forfeited; was shown the very paper had signed which admitted the right of seizure.

I went to the first policeman I met—I have always had a blind faith in the police. He was a fat man with cheeks that overhung his neck, but he was Harry Curtis-Bennett to me.

"They've got no right to keep your money", he said loudly, "and you can't sign away anything because you're a minor."

I thought my dingy countenance had misled him to the belief that I was a heaver of coal. He explained.

"You're under age", he said.

"I'm twelve last birthday", I said regretfully.

"Take a summons", he said, in his juridical way.

So I went to the police court and sandwiched myself in a queue between a girl who wanted a weekly allowance from the father of her child, and a miserable man who came to complain of his pugnacious wife. In turn I told the magistrate the sad story of the five shillings.

"Take a summons", he said.

It cost me a shilling. I conducted my own case and won my first lawsuit.

As I came out of court, I was approached by a policeman with a broken nose.

"You used to be called Freeman", he accused.

Quakingly I admitted the truth of the charge.

He pointed to his nose.

"Your brother Harry done that", he said.

He seemed to bear no malice. We had tea together in a coffee shop and he paid. I tried another printers—Riddle & Couchmans—and was quite happy. I was in the paper store and it was very interesting. Have you seen electric sparks come from between two sheets of paper after they have been under a hydraulic press? Did you know that you could cut your finger to the bone on the sharp edge of paper? There was a boy there who painted pictures. He was going to exhibit in the Royal Academy one day. I often wonder if he did, or whether he became an artist.