"You may think I'm a silly old woman, Duncan. I dare say I am. I can't take in things as I used to do when I was young. But if Leonard should be killed in the war—I think of it night and day—what I should like to do would be to drive to the Market Square of Wellingsford and wave a Union Jack round and round and fall down dead."
I made some sort of sympathetic gesture.
"And I certainly should," she added.
"My dear friend," said I, "if I could move from this confounded chair, I would kiss your brave hands."
And how many brave hands of English mothers, white and delicate, coarse and toil-worn, do not demand the wondering, heart-full homage of us all?
And hundreds of thousands of them don't know why we are fighting. Hundreds of thousands of them have never read a newspaper in their lives. I doubt whether they would understand one if they tried, I doubt whether all could read one in the literal sense of the word. We have had—we have still—the most expensive and rottenest system of primary education in the world, the worst that squabbling sectarians can devise. Arab children squatting round the courtyard of a Mosque and swaying backwards and forwards as they get by heart meaningless bits of the Koran, are not sent out into life more inadequately armed with elementary educational weapons than are English children. Our state of education has nominally been systematised for forty-five years, and yet now in our hospitals we have splendid young fellows in their early twenties who can neither read nor write. I have talked with them. I have read to them. I have written letters for them. Clean-cut, decent, brave, honourable Englishmen—not gutter-bred Hooligans dragged from the abyss by the recruiting sergeant, but men who have thrown up good employment because something noble inside them responded to the Great Call. And to the eternal disgrace of governments in this disastrously politician-ridden land such men have not been taught to read and write. It is of no use anyone saying to me that it is not so. I know of my own certain intimate knowledge that it is so.
Even among those who technically have "the Three R's," I have met scores of men in our Wellingsford Hospital who, bedridden for months, would give all they possess to be able to enjoy a novel—say a volume of W. W. Jacobs, the writer who above all others has conferred the precious boon of laughter on our wounded—but to whom the intellectual strain of following the significance of consecutive words is far too great. Thousands and thousands of men have lain in our hospitals deprived, by the criminal insanity of party politicians, of the infinite consolation of books.
Christ, whom all these politicians sanctimoniously pretend to make such a fuss of, once said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. And yet we regard this internecine conflict between our precious political parties as a sacred institution. By Allah, we are a funny people!
Of course your officials at the Board of Education—that beautiful timber-headed, timber-hearted, timber-souled structure—could come down on me with an avalanche of statistics. "Look at our results," they cry. I look. There are certain brains that even our educational system cannot benumb. A few clever ones, at the cost of enormously expensive machinery, are sent to the universities, where they learn how to teach others the important things whereby they achieved their own unimportant success. The shining lights are those whom we turn out as syndicalist leaders and other kinds of anti-patriotic demagogues. We systematically deny them the wine of thought, but give them the dregs. But in the past we did not care; they were vastly clever people, a credit to our national system. It gave them chances which they took. We were devilish proud of them.
On the other hand, the vast mass are sent away with the intellectual equipment of a public school-boy of twelve, and, as I have declared, a large remnant have not been taught even how to read and write. The storm of political controversy on educational matters has centred round such questions as whether the story of Joseph and his Brethren and the Parable of the Prodigal Son should be taught to little Baptists by a Church of England teacher, and what proportion of rates paid by Church of England ratepayers should go to giving little Baptists a Baptistical training. If there was a Christ who could come down among us, with what scorching sarcasm would he not shrivel up the Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who in His Name have prevented the People from learning how to read and write.