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. "Coelum 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.