ABSTRACT
Looking back upon it after thirty years, one can see the strength and the weakness of the movement as it then existed. Its strength was that it aimed at opening the opportunity of serious study in subjects like literature, history, economics, philosophy and others, that belong to a college rather than a school course, to men and women already employed in trade or business of one kind or another. It drew from the beginning largely from this class, "workers" in the wide sense of the word. But of workers in the narrower sense of labourers, skilled or unskilled, the classes did not attract very many. The gap between the elementary school children of fourteen and the young man or woman of eighteen was still too great. Canon Barnett criticized the movement as coming "twenty years too late." In reality it came twenty and more years too early. He comforted us, however, by giving it to us as his experience that "you aim at one class and hit another." Anyway it could be said of our connection with this work, as of our connection with that of the Education Committees, that,
