until it is allowed to prevail there can be no peace in the world,
that even victories must be unavailing while the hard-won lessons
they bring are taught in terms of fiction. Truth tells us that the
fog of war is hardly more horrible than the fog of falsehood; product
of a poison gas that is manufactured by every country alike. To the
Prussians who are in our midst striving to fasten upon us the fetters
fashioned by our enemies for the control of all liberty, comes the
secret warning that such fetters will not fit the Anglo-Saxon people,
that the rivets will not hold, that they will be torn asunder and even
used as weapons against all forgers. Truth will tell those who seek to
effect economies at the expense of education that only sound training
and diligent application to every form of activity can enable us to
hold our own against Germany, whether the defeat of that country be
whole or partial. Truth says the will of the people is being forged as
of wrought iron upon the fields of war, and that the days of privilege
are numbered. Truth whispers that the burdens imposed upon those yet
unborn, not only in Great Britain, but in every belligerent country can
only be met if they are shared by one and all, not with any sense of
precedence or class distinction but in a brotherhood that embraces all
who labour whether with hand or brain to the common end. Truth will
whisper to those who shrink before strong, whole-hearted and courageous
methods necessary to bring all classes into line that the needs of
the time are paramount and that those who will not steer the ship of
State to a safe harbour because of the adverse winds and storming
waves that lie ahead, must yield to other pilots cast in sterner
mould. It will point out that the old days of political trifling and
dalliance are numbered, that right and wrong, bravery and cowardice,
energy and inaction, whatever their future, can no longer be weighed
in the unjust balances of the party system. Truth will say that our
empire needs the best service, not only of every man, but of every
woman, and in consequence, that both must be rendered fit to serve and
allowed to express themselves to the State's best advantage without
reference to pedigree or sex. It will declare that an England in which
the labours of six men out of seven are valued at three pounds a week
or under, cannot endure for the simple reason that under the present
social system, hundreds of thousands of really capable people who could
deserve well of their country are doomed by poverty to ineffectiveness.
Truth will say bluntly that the future demands statesmen rather than
politicians, men in their prime rather than men in their decline. It
will whisper of the vigorous democracies that the genius of empire
has brought into being, the democracies that have striven so nobly to
save the empire and must--not for reasons of sentiment alone--play
their part in administering it. There will not be wanting the reminder
that the season in which crises, military, social, political, can be
smothered in platitudes is past, not in our time to return.
If Truth were to proclaim these facts duly pointed and applied,
together with many another of like weight and significance from the
house-tops, the Defence of the Realm Act would intervene promptly,
strongly and passionately on behalf of Fiction; but the Act has
limitations. The Still Small Voice evades the Act every time, it speaks
less from the lips than to the hearts of men. There is no humbug so
highly placed as to be able to shut it out, there is no man or woman so
befogged or bewildered by the horror of the hour that he cannot hear
the silences made audible. For Truth is not cast out of life, it is
but despised and rejected by the world's rulers and even they cannot
shut out the voice that whispers through all their waking hours, for
while many men can deceive others, few, if any, are permitted entirely
to deceive themselves in times like these. So many soft conventions
have fallen by the way, so many of life's excuses and subterfuges
have fallen into everlasting nothingness. Before the horror-stricken
eyes of authority the world over, Truth, muzzled, bedraped, masked,
and shrouded appears again like the skeleton at the feast, like the
grinning skull that accompanied the Roman Emperors on their Triumphs
to remind them that they too were mortal. Slowly yet with deliberation
Truth is beginning to shed the coverings that officialdom had heaped in
such designed profusion. The day is not far distant when the fetters
will fall from the limbs, the shroud from the dread face, and in that
hour not all the Acts and Proscriptions will avail to frame a covering.
Europe, bleeding, sore, wounded, poverty-stricken, shattered beyond
recognition, will see Truth face to face. And then----?
XVIII
THE CLAIM OF ALL THE CHILDREN
I have been trying to look through the clouds of war to what lies
behind. Quite resolutely I have closed my ears to certain empty
cries about the commercial conquest of Germany, about the coming of
Protection, about all the panaceas of political and other quacks.
Most of us who take the trouble to think can trace these cries to
their source. I have endeavoured to look to the time when this old
country of ours will be faced by a new set of conditions, by forces yet
incalculable that war has brought into being. People have talked and
written glibly about changes of heart, of the fraternising of capital
and labour, of sin and crime and disease exorcised by some supreme
spirit of good will, but I have my doubts. "Cœlum non animum mutant,"
wrote Horace, two thousand years ago.
Men have always made good resolutions in times of stress; they range
from the nation's ideals voiced by its spokesmen down to the promise
of candles for the shrine of some saint. The mind can follow the road
that connects our English House of Commons or the Russian home of the
Duma with the church of Notre Dame de la Garde whereto the men who
traffic in the mighty waters of the Gulf of Lyons pay with knick-knacks
for their real or imaginary protection. I have no faith in the power
of good intentions to act automatically. When this war is over and
we are faced with a victory, an indecisive result, or a defeat, the
tendency of our insularity will be to interfere as little as may be
with pre-existing conditions. Men who serve in high places will be
overwrought; you do not carry a part of the burden of the British
Empire upon your shoulders without a maximum of strain. The tendency
will, I fear, be to declare that the evil of the day is sufficient,
that the nation must be kept secure from new ideas. There will be few
to make excursion in search of trouble. Yet there can be very few
students of social progress who will not admit that the only way in
which we can make good the losses of war, is by turning to the best
possible account the assets left to us at its conclusion. And the
supreme asset of a State is its children.
Let us leave aside for the moment all the other burning social
questions of the time. They are not the less poignant because a great
patriotic impulse has kept so much suffering silent. The question of
the future of our great Empire is one that must be decided in a large
measure by those who are children to-day. We have to ask ourselves
what we are doing to prepare them for their labours, and how far such
preparation can bear comparison with that made by the nations which
will be our competitors. We are the trustees of the British Empire,
Unlimited. What manner of estate are we going to bequeath to our
children?
Down to the summer of 1914, we had every means of doing well for
the generation that must grasp the reins when at Time's bidding we
relinquish them. That we had misused those means goes without saying.
As far as education goes it was said years ago of our richest schools
that a vast sum of money was expended on education, and that a beggarly
account of empty brains was the result. That indictment holds good
to-day. The education of the children of the wealthy is both costly
and ineffective. Much that is taught bears no relation to the needs
of twentieth-century life. Middle class education is better without
being good, while the State education that, as far as the poor is
concerned, is both obligatory and free, is worth what it costs.
Secondary Education is pursued if at all under conditions of the
greatest difficulty. Boys and girls too under our present evil economic
conditions are turned into wage-earners at the earliest possible
moment. County Council classes, often capably conducted and well within
the reach of the great majority, cannot find adequate support for
many reasons. One is that the primary education of the poor does not
encourage the habit of study. The ill-fed children of the slums look
upon school as a necessary evil, redeemed to a small extent by the gift
of free meals, over which, we, the richest nation of the earth, haggled
so long. When the children of the poor have reached the standard or
the age that sets them free, the struggle for life begins and finds
them too jaded at the end of the normal day's work to seek fresh
instruction, even if they have an inclination or ambition to improve
their minds. Untrained, undisciplined, condemned in many instances to
blind-alley employment, what better is to be expected? Again we are
face to face with the demand for cheap labour, the labour that enriches
the employer and even gives an illusory benefit to the State. Save in
the direction of making laws, most of them foolish, and raising money,
much of it ill spent, the State follows a policy of _laissez faire_.
The effort to make primary education compulsory has seemingly left it
without the energy to see that it should also be sound and effective.
The latter-day squabbles between Church and State in the schoolroom
have always been regarded as more interesting than education itself.
Legislators by the score have shown in Parliament that the question of
feeding hungry children so that they may be physically fit to learn,
is the only side of education over which they are prepared to spend any
thought, and that in order to oppose action. So these things were down
to the time when England went to war, so they will be after England
returns to peace unless the great body of public opinion in the country
will realise that no victory can be enduring if countries anxious
to compete with us in the future give a genuine education to their
children while we remain content with a spurious one for ours. The
issue cannot be evaded; the responsibility cannot be shirked. French
education, German, Dutch, Danish, and Swiss are better than ours. They
take into account the needs of the times. They are not founded upon old
and obsolete prejudices. The technical side of educational needs is
fairly and fully met. The State equipment is better. The teachers know
that there are people in the world who do not speak English, and that
several European languages not only have a claim to consideration, but
must be taught by competent masters; that is to say, by men and women
with a liberal education born in the land whose language they teach.
Travelling scholarships should be the first reward of those who excel
at school. The incentive would be immense, and the contribution to the
forces of peace immeasurable.
Even our cousins across the Atlantic, who have made their educational
system a living thing, have failed to teach us. Andrew Carnegie,
remembering the land of his birth, has liberally endowed Scottish
University Education with the gold of Pittsburg. Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, and other American colleges are an example to the world, in
Canada the lesson has been learned, in Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere,
and will soon be fully applied. But here in England those who cannot
go to Oxford or Cambridge will find that, for the most part, they must
be external students in pursuit of the higher education, with little
of the joyous intercourse that kindles ambitions and ideals. We look
a little askance at education. For the man in the street the really
great representatives of Cam and Isis are those who can row from
Putney to Mortlake in the early spring, and those who can shine at the
cricket ground in Marylebone about midsummer. Scholarship is something
in the nature of a harmless eccentricity, calling less for rebuke
than for derision. For this view-point our hopeless system of primary
education is responsible. To be effective in this country education
must be revised to meet the times we live in, made popular and finally
democratised. As I write we are waging war at the price of some four or
five million pounds a day. We must wage peace with as fine a disregard
for inevitable expenditure. The cost of one week's war will maintain
an entirely different system of national education for a year. I would
like to deal in brief broad outline with what might be attempted.
It is only necessary to concede in the first instance that a sane
Government recognises the paramount claims of the children, the
terrible loss of much of the country's best blood, and the consequent
need of bringing what is left to us to the highest pitch of public
utility. These premises should surely stand beyond controversy. Why
should not every slum child have its share of public-school life free
of all charge? If we have come to the conclusion that this is the best
thing for the future of the country, why should the majority of the
little ones be left out? Does anybody hold that we do not require the
best that all the children can do for England? To those who suggest
that such a simple matter is revolutionary, or that it will cost too
much, one reply is that our children are our greatest national asset.
Upon our capacity to rear them well and wisely and to educate them to
the needs of the time, the whole future of the British Empire depends.
There is really nothing revolutionary about the proposal, for, if you
come to think of it, we give free education and even free meals, and
the most hardened Conservative will acknowledge freely enough that
the slum is not a good training ground for the rising generation. You
cannot clear slums away in a hurry. The owners of such places are
regarded if not with affection, at least with respect by the law and
the law makers, but you can run up boarding establishments that will
be infinitely superior to slums, and you can gather within them the
outcasts of the capitalistic system for proper feeding, clothing,
education, and training. If children go wrong they are sent to special
schools. All that is necessary is that instead of the children going
wrong, the grown-ups shall go right, that they shall recognise how
little their politics, prejudices and preconceptions matter by the
side of one child's welfare. I go as far as to declare that it is the
bounden duty of the State to make its gift of education effective, that
in making education compulsory it recognised certain paramount duties
that remain fulfilled only in the letter, and not in the spirit. One
does not advocate change, however beneficial, for the mere sake of a
nobler and wider life, such pleas do not gain prompt acceptance. Rather
let it be stated quite frankly that, unless we turn the best aptitudes
and capacities of the rising generation to the fullest account, we
cannot hope to maintain our position in the face of competition. As a
nation we handicap ourselves lamentably when we endeavour to hold our
own in the world with no more than a small part of our national assets
realised or realisable. Children are our assets, and between the infant
mortality on the one hand, blind product of ignorance, poverty, and
apathy, and indifferent education on the other hand, we stand a very
bad chance in the battle for supremacy. If we would increase, preserve,
and train child life we could look to the future without misgiving.
Edmund Burke, who will not be found to have given many hostages to
socialism, declared that the citizens of a State are a partnership,
that every member of such partnership has a right to a fair portion of
all that society with all its combinations of skill and force can do in
his favour, and that he has a right to the fruits of his own industry
and the improvement of his own offspring. Let us be content to leave
the case as Burke stated it in the time of George III., it will be seen
that we have not yet gained for the average man the minima that the
most eloquent statesman of his time prescribed. It is also clear that
this claim for a full and free education is not the claim for charity,
but the claim for a right that should be deemed inalienable. The grant
of this right enriches while appearing to impoverish the State, and
a step that some will deem socialistic and others revolutionary is
fairly defined as common-sense procedure. We have at last reached the
stage of agreeing that child life must be increased, preserved, and
cultivated to the best ends, but there is a fatal inclination in this
country to regard the theoretical acceptance of a principle as the
equivalent of its complete practical development. When you discuss the
whole vital question with sensible people they prove, almost without
exception, in accord, but as soon as you say, "_therefore let us endow
maternity, pass Pure Milk Bills, protect the mother from wrongful
labour before and after confinement, and the child from mal-nutrition,
educate the child when it is old enough to be educated, submit it to
reasonable discipline and prepare it physically, morally, and mentally
to fill the place for which it is best fitted in the workshop of the
world_," the theorists are unable to follow. Some constitutional
timidity holds them. They will not gallop across country to reach
their goal, fences and ditches frighten them, and all gates must be
unfastened. It is well for those of us whose ambitions for England
are inexhaustible, and who watch the shadow on Life's Dial moving
inexorably towards the sunset that we dare not despair of humanity. The
pen, however ill we may wield it, gives us courage. We know that when
our views are issued broadcast they resemble the seed in the Parable of
the Sower, and that some worker who in days yet unborn will lead the
children of the poor to their safe harbour out of the troubled waters
on which their helpless lives are tossed, will have gathered a part
of his inspiration and force from the thoughts of those who have gone
before.
What is it that taints our physical bravery as a nation with so much
moral cowardice? Why is it that countless thousands will face shot and
shell and wounds horrible beyond imagining with quiet heroism, and
will yet shrink from the display of moral courage required to tell
their rulers that, until the poorest child of England has its rights
and its chance, they have failed in their duty, and that they must put
the national house in order? I would wager that a majority, a large
majority of both Houses of Parliament would be prepared to admit in
private conversation all the claims I have put forward on behalf of
the little ones, and that they would in public find a score of excuses
for not pressing them. The most frequent excuse will of course be that
after this war we shall lack the means. But I protest that whatever
the date of peace, if it be a peace that meets our hopes, we shall be
in a state in which we could find the means for at least another year
of war if need be. Who will deny that it is better to create, cherish,
and equip life than to devote our vast resources to its destruction?
Equality, liberty, and fraternity are the first-fruits of liberal
education, the fine flower of progress. The war found our wealth
accumulating and our people deteriorating, so slowly to be sure that
they were able to pull themselves together and appeal with certainty to
the favourable verdict of world history, but yet deteriorating. Slums,
prostitution, crime, insanity, drink, irresponsible wealth, all these
evils were beginning to fester in the body politic, and war has applied
the surgeon's knife to the open sore. Is peace to see it extirpated
or allowed to grow again? I think in all honesty and sincerity that
our treatment of the children will decide. If we will learn from our
neighbours on the continent and our kinsmen across the Atlantic we may
renew our strength. We may even justify the sacrifice of those who by
reason of their love of England will never return to us.
There is another and a sacred ground for this appeal. Let us remember
the nameless dead, those whose heroism is expressed in part of a
crowded line of small print, who had nothing but their lives to offer
to their country, who had no chance in life and who when the bands
of the body were breaking gave their last anxious thoughts to little
ones doomed under our harsh system of social life to drift where and
how they can. Who among those they died to leave in security and a
sufficiency of the world's goods would come forward and say, "In
spite of all these dead men did for me I will oppose a measure that
will give their children useful and honourable lives, because what is
left to me of life will be passed without some luxuries I have enjoyed
hitherto?" I venture to say there are none who would put this sentiment
in words. Yet there are thousands, tens of thousands whose deeds will
say it for them, not because they are utterly selfish, callous, or
hard-hearted, but because they lack the saving grace of imagination.
The most of the evil that disfigures the earth is due to this inability
to see beyond our own needs. In the labour, the upheaval, the expense
of a movement needed to equip the generation that will so soon succeed
our own, we overlook the salient truth that it is no more than the
fulfilment of a solemn duty, a pledge that binds us to the dead though
it was never given. For who will suggest that the poor men, the bulk
of those who fought and died for England, faced their fate to maintain
the slum and the gin palace and the labour of the poor prostitute who
sells her body that she may eat to live, or drink to forget how she
is living? Surely they died for the faith that was in them, with some
dim fore-knowledge of happier days for those they left behind. We are
the executors of their unwritten testament. If, as so many believe,
there is some form of consciousness in the unknown world of which they
are the sudden denizens, will they not be looking even now to see if
we whose debt is so great have determined to pay it? And what better
faith can we keep than by giving to the lives they have left behind the
simple rights that were denied to them? Every rich man, every member of
the comfortable classes claims these benefits for his children, and if
the war has given birth to a true spirit of brotherhood, the children
of the poor cannot be forgotten. They lack the means, we have them.
From this simple truth and the consequent, inexorable duty there is no
escape with a clean conscience.
XIX
THE PRUSSIAN IN OUR MIDST
War throws a blinding light upon the strength and the weakness of
nations, and in England we may claim that we have faced the light
without any revelations of which we need feel ashamed. Our mistakes
have been rather of temperament than character, and whether in
mustering our millions on the voluntary system or surrendering our
hard-won liberties to an authority that has shown no sign of suffering
from wisdom in excess, or giving fully and freely of our resources
to the national cause, we may claim to have shown in our collective
capacity a generous response to the most varied and unexpected
demands. Incidentally we have discovered in our midst a body of men,
happily small in number, and not too significant in position, who
would fain embody in our national life the worst vices that we are
said to be fighting in the one foe that counts. These men, whose
political sagacity exists in inverse ratio to their prejudices, are
ever prompting the worst elements in our rulers and threatening and
intriguing against the others.
To them war is no frightful necessity imposed upon a free and peaceful
people, but a providential opportunity for taking occasion by the hand;
the voice is the voice of Prussia, but the hands are English hands.
Our Prussians have always been in evidence, but, while the government
of the empire was trusted to their friends, they were content to be
quietly active. It is now nearly ten years since a Liberal Government
came into power, and with the advent of Radical legislation our
Prussians--they call them Tories over here--became active.
When taxation threatened their superfluous wealth, they called heaven
and earth to witness that such an outrage had no sanction. When the
House of Lords, long the supreme force of obstruction, was threatened
they grew frantic, and at many a well-spread board declared themselves
ready to dine--I mean die--in the last ditch before submitting to the
indignity of democratic government.