On the other hand, education goes further in America than in any other country. You often hear exaggerated statements of what the Russian Bolsheviks are doing for the education of the Russian masses—they have "voted" and "assigned" and "planned"—and they have no teachers. But America has teachers and schools, the best equipped in the world. She is ready to spend money; she has faith in education, she has the will to get it. The High Schools of America are very remarkable, both in the number of them and in their size. Americans who have not traveled in the old home countries of Europe can hardly measure what magnificent institutions they have in their public schools, and what an advantage the average American child holds over the average child of any other nation.
Again, the number of colleges and universities is phenomenal. It reflects no doubt the wealth of America and also the turning of the back upon America's raw, primitive, uncouth past. England, by virtue of her history, is too phlegmatic to do much for the higher education of the masses.
I sent ye to school and ye wadna learn,
I bought ye books and ye wadna read,
is the traditional attitude of the Englishman. "Too much of school makes Jack a dull boy," says he, and takes his boy away. In this I believe the Englishman is largely wrong. The dull, ignorant part of our population is far larger than it ought to be, and constitutes a national danger.
How far education in America is ahead of education in England may be judged by the size of the reading public. Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria has five readers in America for every one in England. A similar ratio existed for Maynard Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace Treaty and for Wells' Outline of History.
There is, therefore, an educated class far in excess of the upper forty thousand. There may be a whole million of well-read people. And the number progresses with the children who swarm through new big schools and universities.
8
Where is it all going? Is it drifting southward as I am, to Mexico, to Empire? Will it stay where it is and wax more illustrious? "Tell me where you have come from and I will tell you where you are going," saith the Cynic. "An evil crow, an evil egg." America as a nation was born in the throes of the War of North and South. Or it rose out of Washingtonian independence and Jeffersonian idealism. Or it arose from the Puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers, or from the adventure spirit of the gentlemen of Virginia. From such origins one could chart some kind of destiny. But not with surety. One must go further back to the spirit of Elizabethan sailors, to Drake, and a thousand others. Latin America derives from the Conquistadores of Spain, but Anglo-Saxon America derives as surely from the English conquerors. America was Imperial before she was Democratic, and English before she was American. But then again the English, or at least the Saxons, were a sturdy, independent race, intolerant of bondage, urgent for their civic rights, always proud of freedom. If there is one thing that is with difficulty soluble in Anglo-Saxondom, it is character. It is by virtue of character that England has been a ruler of peoples, and possibly again it is character as much as business and excessive wealth and a leisured class that will lead America along her road of destiny. It is still in the air as to which road that will be—the way of Roosevelt or the way of Lincoln.