On that assertion of Slingsby Darton’s they drifted past the paying-desk to the small smoking-room, and there they had a great dispute about education beneath a gallery audience, so to speak, composed of antelope, Barbary sheep, gnu, yaks, and a sea lion. Oswald had never realized before how passionately he believed in education. It was a revelation. He discovered himself. He wanted to tell these men they were uneducated. He did succeed in saying that Mr. Chamberlain was “essentially an uneducated man.”
Walsall was a very trying opponent for a disputant of swift and passionate convictions. He had a judicial affectation, a Socratic pose. He was a grey, fluffy-headed man with large tortoiseshell spectacles and a general resemblance to a kind wise owl. He liked to waggle his head slowly from side to side and smile. He liked to begin sentences with “But have you thought——?” or “I think you have overlooked——” or “So far from believing that, I hold the exact converse.” He said these things in a very suave voice as though each remark was carefully dressed in oil before serving.
He expressed grave doubts whether there was “any benefit in education—any benefit whatever.”
But the argument that formed that evening’s entertainment for the sea lion and those assorted ruminating artiodactyls was too prolonged and heated and discursive to interest any but the most sedulous reader. Every possible sort of heresy about education seemed loose that night for the affliction of Oswald. Slingsby Darton said, “Make men prosperous and education will come of its own accord.” Walsall thought that the sort of people who benefited by education “would get on anyhow.” He thought knowledge was of value according to the difficulty one experienced in attaining it. (Could any sane man really believe that?) “I would persecute science,” said Walsall, “and then it would be taken care of by enthusiasts.”
“But do you know,” said Oswald, with an immense quiet in his manner, “that there is a—a British Empire? An empire with rather urgent needs?”
(Suppressed murmur from Slingsby Darton: “Then I don’t see what your position is at all!”)
Walsall disputed these “needs.” Weren’t we all too much disposed to make the empire a thing of plan and will? An empire was a growth. It was like a man, it grew without taking thought. Presently it aged and decayed. We were not going to save the empire by taking thought.
(Slingsby Darton, disregarded, now disagreeing with Walsall.)
“Germany takes thought,” Oswald interjected.
“To its own undoing, perhaps,” said Walsall....