To any mortal such persecution had been fatal, but Truth is immortal and persists. Not even the Jews whose sufferings are eternal, or the Belgians, Poles, Armenians, Servians, and others whose persecution though intolerable is temporary, strive to recover their vanished freedom as resolutely as Truth. The harder you use it, the greater its persistence. Drive it out at the door it returns by the window, an indefatigable, untiring immortal, seemingly unconscious of the loss of popularity, convinced that it has a place in the great scheme of things. It whispers to kings on their thrones, and to chancellors in their studies, to statesmen on Government and opposition benches, to clergymen in their pulpits, lawyers in their consulting rooms; passing by janitor, secretary, and a sub-editorial array, it even invades the editor's desk, persistent though ignored. Trampled upon, cast aside, ignored, eviscerated, turned inside out, confuted, obscured, denied, perverted, misunderstood and damned, it still labours, powerful as in the days when old Thomas Carlyle watched its progress through the world and hailed it alone immortal. With a striking disregard of the laws of emergency and confusion, it declines to be regarded as an enemy alien. With an utter contempt for a Fiction entrenched behind all the barbed wires of popularity, it whispers the most disconcerting statements to those who hoped or believed that it was dead. None can say what form the instructions, warnings, and admonitions take, but all may guess them, and the temptation so to do is ever present.
I think that the one outstanding fact upon which Truth insists is that 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.