The bishop’s method of annoyance was even blander than Walsall’s, and more exasperating to the fevered victim. He talked of the evils of an “educated proletariat.” For a stable community only a certain proportion of educated people was advisable. You could upset the social balance by over-educating the masses. “We destroy good, honest, simple-souled workers in order to make discontented clerks.” Oswald spluttered, “You must make a citizen in a modern population understand something of the State he belongs to!”
“Better, Faith,” said the bishop. “Far better, Faith. Teach them a simple Catechism.”
He had visited Russia. He had been to the coronation of the Tzar, a beautiful ceremony, only a little marred by a quite accidental massacre of some of the spectators. Those were the days before the Russo-Japanese war and the coming of the Duma. There was much to admire in Russia, the good bishop declared; much to learn. Russia was the land of Mary, great-souled and blessed; ours alas! was the land of bustling Martha. Nothing more enviable than the political solidarity of Russia—“after our warring voices.... Time after time I asked myself, ’Aren’t we Westerns on the wrong track? Here is something—Great. And growing greater. Something simple. Here is obedience and a sort of primitive contentment. Trust in the Little White Father, belief in God. Here Christianity lives indeed.’”
About eleven o’clock Walsall was propounding a paradox. “All this talk of education,” he said, “reminds me of the man who tried to lift himself by his own ears. How, I ask myself, can a democracy such as ours take an intelligent interest in its destiny unless it is educated, and how can it educate itself unless it takes an intelligent interest in its destiny? How escape that dilemma?”
“A community,” said Oswald, grappling with this after a moment, “a community isn’t one mind, it’s a number of minds, some more intelligent, some less. It’s a perpetual flow of new minds——”
Then something gave way within him.
“We sit here,” he said in a voice so full of fury that the mouth of the bishop fell open, “and while we talk this half-witted, half-clever muck to excuse ourselves from getting the nation into order, the sands run out of the glass. The time draws near when the empire will be challenged——”
He stood up abruptly.
“Have you any idea,” he said, “what the empire might be? Have you thought of these hundreds of millions to whom we might give light—had we light? Are we to be a possessing and profit-hunting people because we have not the education to be a leaderly people? Are we to do no better than Rome and Carthage—and loot the provinces of the world? Loot or education, that is the choice of every imperial opportunity. All England, I find, is echoing with screams for loot. Have none of us vision? None?”
The bishop shook his head sadly. The man, he thought, was raving.