Every development of the great national machinery designed for the intellectual illumination of the people has wrought more and more desolation in the country places. The last of these has been the worst. In Scotland the parish school since the days of Knox was the centre of intellectual activity, and the parish schoolmasters were able to send their scholars straight to the University. But the pundits at last decreed that this must cease. Secondary education was banished from the parish schools. The teachers who formerly had scope for, and joy in, the higher spheres of teaching were consigned one and all to the withered fields of elementary education. All the secondary teaching was concentrated in the towns where central schools were established, to which promising children who desired such training were collected.
The result has been disastrous. The light of higher education in each rural parish has been quenched. The secondary education has been concentrated in towns, and only a few parents could face the additional burden of providing lodgings for their children. The pundits made no provision for the proper accommodation for boys and girls at the most critical period of their lives. No hostels were built for them. In insanitary villages they were left to whatever provision decayed houses could provide for them. In these schools religious and moral training was banned. After school hours boys and girls, removed from the salutary influences of their homes, were left to the social joys of the street corners. The main industry of many of these towns was that of the hotel and public-house. The result has been that a large proportion of boys and girls who in the shelter of their homes would have grown into a worthy and useful citizenship have been utterly ruined. The system was devised that the few might be pushed up the ladder into the region of the higher knowledge, leaving all record of God and moral duty behind with their elementary textbooks; and no provision whatever was made to safeguard them, in the course of the giddy ascent, from toppling over and falling into the mud. And the great system, instead of elevating, crashed them into the mire. And this devastating process still goes on. The rising generation in the country places in Scotland are made unfit for country life by a false education, and, through its neglect of their higher needs, many of them are ruined. A nation that spends five millions a day on war would not in its education system provide for the social and moral needs of its sons and daughters. It sacrificed everything to the brain. And the result has been desolation in many a family in Scotland in lonely glens and by the sea. Our education machinery has, in truth, been Prussianised, and in the process the soul has been grievously wounded. The class that provided the ministers of religion in wide stretches of Scotland, provides them no more. A generation of boys left to the moral influences of the street corners, undisciplined and disregarded, can provide the nation with clerks and not with leaders in the sphere of the soul.
IV
There is no sign that the nation is waking to the misery wrought by the bureaucrats. All the cry is for a further march along the same road. The Government have in these last days appointed two Commissions on Education, the one to 'inquire into the position occupied by natural science,' and the other 'into the position occupied by the study of modern languages,' in the educational system, and they are to consider the matter, the one in relation to the 'interests of the trades, industries, and professions' dependent on science, and the other in relation to the 'interests of commerce and public service.' In this there is no hint that what the nation mostly needs is the development of character, the re-enforcement of soul. We are to investigate with our eye on commerce; the material gain is still our goal. The Germanised minds have won their first victory. The future path of our development is to be the path of the Teuton, and we are to tread it like him, sacrificing our souls to Mammon. For the sake of commerce we must go on pushing our boys faster up the ladder, heedless of debris of moral wreckage at its foot!
A still more depressing symptom is the policy already adumbrated by the Government to mitigate the devastation wrought in the country places. Our armies now number millions, but the Government introduces a bill to settle a few hundred soldiers on the land! Millions of acres lie waste, but the Government proposes to deal with a few thousand acres here and there. The needs of the future require an exodus from the Egypt of the slums and from the slavery of that industrialism which adds nothing to the world's true riches, and the re-establishment of the people in their true heritage, the land. But the Government proposes to reinstate a handful. There is no sign that the politician has as yet realised that agriculture is the noblest of industries, a nation's true wealth. And there is no realisation of the only method by which this can be done. It is the magic of ownership that alone will restore to the people the joy in the land. The rent system is doomed to failure. In the words 'my own' there is a glamour which turns even sand into gold. When to the masses that have been despoiled there is again restored the privilege of designating a little portion of the land of their fathers, their own, then, and only then, will the country places once more waken to life, and the desolation of generations be at last removed. A nation for which millions have been found ready to die must surely provide for the living such social conditions as will enable them to live joyous and clean lives. In kingdoms teeming with riches, no heart must be starved of beauty, no life starved of bread, and no soul starved of God.
[[1]] A hundred years ago there were 5 deer forests in Scotland, now there are 200. Since 1891 the acreage in Scotland under deer and devoted to sport increased from over 2 ½ millions of acres to over 3 ½ millions of acres. This process of increasing the area devoted to sport has gone on even since the war began. This land, to the extent of two millions of acres, can be reclaimed for human use. Scotland has talked of afforestation for a generation—and done nothing! During the last twenty-five years, while the politicians pursued their game, the people of Scotland lost an additional million of acres so far as food production is concerned!