Sir,—Those of us who know the need of encouragement for higher education, if we are to repair the waste of brain power through this cruel war, and those who have had experience of the joy given to thousands by the preserving, open to the public for ever, places of historic interest or natural beauty, cannot help hoping that you will lend us your powerful aid in urging that two forms of possible memorial to our heroic dead shall not be forgotten.

1. The endowing of our unendowed secondary schools with scholarships that will admit the brighter scholars who are otherwise quite unable to do so to pass to our universities.
2. The obtaining of some beautiful view-point or open space or place of historic interest to be dedicated to the public in memory of the brave men of the locality who have given up their lives for King and Empire.

An offer has just reached me, which will be laid before the National Trust at their next meeting, of 20 acres of glorious moorland within reach of one of our large Lancashire cities, and this in memory of one known to be a lover of nature who has fallen in the war.

I feel so sure that this good example would be followed, to the great advantage of future generations and to the imperishable honour of the dead if only the idea can become current, that I dare to ask of your kind insertion of this letter.  

(Times, 4 February 1916, p. 7)

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The issue of the war is tremendous.  The question before us is this:  “Shall civilisation in future depend upon military preparedness and the mere mechanics of war, or on treaty obligations and faith between the nations?  Is matter or is spirit to be the future safeguard of government and society?” (p. 484)

We are not fighting the German people.  We are fighting Prussia and Prussianism that appears to have leagued itself with diabolic and satanic powers, and no matter how we must admire the splendid discipline, the thorough organisation, the unity of the people, and the courage and resourcefulness of the German army, we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that if Germany wins, civilisation as we know it, and the progress of civilisation that we hope for, is set back for centuries.  But our chance of success in this war depends upon how far as a nation we realise this, and then how far as a nation every mother’s son and daughter of us will give of our best to attempt to defeat this demonic attack on liberty and true human progress….  Britain as yet is only half-hearted.  Such a thing as the possibility of men engaged upon munitions “downing” their tools for an increase of wages is undreamable of in Germany.  Such an idea as attacking in the press men like Lord Kitchener, who is giving the best he has to give to us in his arduous office, would be incredible in Germany.  That men should come out in a tramway or cotton strike at such a time as this and over private quarrels block the smooth running of the nation’s machinery is inconceivable in the enemy’s country. (p. 484)….

I am absolutely opposed to all premature talk of peace.  I think such talk only plays into the hands of the enemy.  Let us do what we can to encourage and keep alive the peaceful temper, but peace talk that is current amongst pacifists only prolongs the war.  History has shown us that unless a conflict of this kind is fought to the bitter end, it means the breaking out of a fresh war within a limited number of years, and though all wild talk about humiliating the German nation should be banned, I think equally should be taboo any talk of a hasty and imperfect settlement. (p. 486)….

Equally unwise does it appear to me to talk about the ending of the War.  After ten months we are very much where we were, and the war in its most terrific form is probably but just beginning. (p. 487)

The war, with all its horrors, has taught us much.  One of the chief lessons is probably this, that if God is dethroned, and Christ is banished from the thoughts of men, the people will bow down to an idol of their own making, for they must have a god.  The idol of Germany’s own making is, as we know, the god of war, and by clever use of the schools, and the universities and the press, she has enabled a very docile people to be beguiled into a belief that sympathy, humanity, compassion are no longer necessities to a well-ordered state; that people need no longer think for themselves or use their freewill or free judgement, but do as the War Lord or the War Office or War State which the War Lord represents demands of them. (p. 487)

Another lesson is that having blinded herself to the fact that the nation can no more than an individual live unto itself or die unto itself, and that God has given to each nation some peculiar power to bring as a contribution to the well-being of the world, she has isolated herself by her insensate selfishness and inordinate self-sufficiency, and has set back the clock of civilisation by brutal methods which would have been impossible to her had she not ceased to have any regard for the opinion of the outside world. (pp. 487-488)

Again, this war has made us realise that there is an over-ruling Providence that shapes the end of nations, rough-hew them how we will.  God has come up very close to us all and by His presence we have proved that Spirit is stronger than flesh. (p. 488)

Nor must we forget the lesson of brotherhood.  The cruel and poisonous attempts of so-called leaders of men to set class against class was already beginning to bear fruit in Great Britain when this war suddenly intervened.  It was discovered that squire and labourer, employer and workman were all of one mind, and heart, and soul, and determination to sacrifice themselves for the good of the world, the empire, and humanity.  The splendid feeling of ‘camaraderie’ which exists from the highest to the lowest amongst our officers and men ashore and afloat, is affecting the whole nation.  We are learning that united we stand as surely as divided we fall.  We are learning the solidarity of empire and the solidifying process of being common sufferers for a common end. (p. 488)

But perhaps the greatest lesson of all is that we are finding that in bearing each other’s burdens for a great end we are fulfilling the law of Christ, and I believe that however much as an empire and a nation we suffer, the Christian churches will be drawn together in a way they little dreamed of, and the spirit of real Christianity will rise upon us all with healing in its wings. (p. 488)

(Parents’ Review, 26 (July 1915), 481-8)

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Sir,—Your readers will be grateful to you for giving publicity to Sir Cecil Smith’s appeal for literary quality in the inscriptions upon war memorials.  But we need to be put on our guard, not only against uninspiring inscriptions, but also against religious commonplaces.  In some dioceses, with more foresight than others, advisory committees of competent men are already at work with helpful suggestion, and all agree in urging that care should be taken not only as to lettering and right spacing of letters, but also as to the wording.  It is, however, very difficult to persuade war memorial committees to break with conventional phrasing.  I heard only yesterday that out of 60 applications for faculty—which before appearing in “Faculty Court” had been referred to such an advisory committee by the Chancellor—40 began with the words “To the glory of God and in memory,” &c.  Now, why should it not be taken for granted that, if the memorial is a thing of beauty and thought, it cannot help being to the glory of the Great Inspirer of all thought and noble beauty?  Why take up tablet place with the commonplace expression of conventional piety which ought to go without saying?  Again, is it wise to go to very well-known passages of Scripture to enforce the splendour of self-sacrifice?  These passages—not always altogether applicable, as, for example, “Greater love hath no man than this,” &c,—weary us with their constant iteration, and seem almost too sacred for such use.  What we surely need is to urge that our heroes gave of their splendid youth for a great cause, that they fought and fell for more than present gain, and that they have bequeathed to us as a legacy of the duty of seeing that they shall not have died in vain.  A few weeks ago you published a quatrain by way of an epitaph that was very much to the point.  Here is another which seems to carry out the idea expressed above:

            These died in War that we at Peace might live,
            These gave their best, so we our best should give,
            Not for themselves—for Justice, Freedom, Right
            They fought, and bid us forward to the Fight.

(Times, 23 June 1919, p. 10)

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The children of to-day are the citizens of to-morrow.  Half-educated and over-worked children cannot grow to manhood and woman-hood capable of meeting the added burden that the result of this war will cast upon them.  Any relaxation of the safe-guards which protect the educational life of the child, and prevent his too early employment is short-sighted policy as unwise as it is unjust. (p. 214)….

And this leads on to the lessons in education that this war is bringing home to us.  What is the secret of German power as exhibited in this war, and as exhibited before the war in its ability to capture the markets of the world?  It is this—the Germans have determined to apply science to every branch of manufacture.  Government and merchants alike have felt that they could not spend money better than in obtaining the help of the scientific brain, and training each workman to a scientific view of his workmanship.  We in Britain as a manufacturing class have hardly realised that the old day of rule-of-thumb has passed away for ever.  When our manufacturers use one scientific expert in their works, the Germans use from twenty to thirty.  When the commercial and manufacturing world in Britain, who are the real wealth-producers of the nation, are ready to employ, and to pay adequately, the university science graduates, and when the scientific expert can command remuneration, and such openings as he certainly would command before the war in Germany, you may depend on it that the teaching of science will come to its own in the scholastic world.  But as Mr. Watson well put it in “The Times” Literary Supplement of Tuesday, April 4th, “It is the commercial world rather than the scholastic that is to be converted to the value of science.  And here we are up against the old problem of British indifference to science.  It is no use to ask where the blame for this lies.  Schoolmasters must take their share as well as others.  But meanwhile the fact remains that we must all combine—scientist and humanist, educationist and manufacturer to alter it.” (p. 215)

And surely another lesson of the war for educationists is that German education spells thoroughness.  The Government and the manufacturer for the last thirty years have been working hand in hand in their efforts to apply science to manufactures, and to capture and if possible, improve upon the best methods in manufacture and in commerce that they could find in any quarter of the world.  When the last Arts and Crafts Exhibition was held the German Government sent over experts not only to make drawings of the best things they could see there, but to visit the craftsmen and workshops that produced these articles with the result that the craft-schools of Germany had at once both patterns and information laid before them, and furniture and the like was produced within a year whose design had come from Britain. (p. 215)….

I realise to the full that as far as the German mind goes, we in Britain can easily compete with Germany if we give our minds a chance.  I doubt if the German mind is half as inventive, or capable off thinking for itself, as is the British.  Where the Germans seem to have the advantage is in the actual love of work.  The ordinary British schoolboy can understand a love of play, but he cannot understand a love of work; and I am persuaded that this lack of the sense of love of work is at the bottom of a good deal of our labour trouble to-day.  I had talks with Ruskin years ago at Oxford, and he insisted that for the future happiness of Great Britain man must learn the joy that comes of working at the very hardest.  In Germany for the past thirty years this appreciation of hard work has been encouraged by the idea that they were not working for themselves individually, but for their fatherland.  And I believe that here in Britain this war in calling forth the dormant sense that we are not only to think of ourselves, but of our country, will possibly bring back something of the power to exert ourselves more unselfishly and at the self-sacrifice for the good of the common-weal.  If every boy at school, and every man when he leaves school, could feel that the harder he worked at his particular job he was adding to the strength of the country that gave him birth, and of the empire to which he belongs, I believe we should have less slackness in our workshops and a nobler ideal of handwork and brain-work throughout the land. (pp. 215-216)

But whilst I say all this, I want to protest against what I call panic legislation.  A lot of scientific professors and others have been demanding that the whole of our system of education should be thrown into the melting pot, that instead of wasting time on Latin and Greek, we should begin to believe that the only education worth the name is the education of the scientific laboratory.  The memorial that they sent out confined the term science in the most short-sighted way to physical science, whereas it is quite plain that science is just as much necessary in the teaching of classics, economics, or archaeology as in chemistry and biology; and all the Continental academies of science include the knowledge of man and history as well as that of nature….  Surely one of the lessons of the war that Germany is teaching us is one that we educationists must lay very seriously to heart.  It is that a nation that gives itself over to pure materialism and leaves out the “humanities” becomes a plague to the civilised world.  We shall be wise in time if whilst we encourage the scientific mind in all our schools we stick to the “humanities” and do all in our power to widen the outlook and sympathies of our growing youth rather than contract them to a single line of scientific specialisation or laboratory work. Pres forward, if you will, the technical side of education, but do not forget history, classics, poetry and cultivation of the religious sense. (p. 216)

At the same time let us refuse to be hidebound to the idea that all boys and girls must go through the same mill.  Each year we lose from technical science promising brains and promising aptitudes because our educational curriculum is too narrow.  A master will soon find out whether a scholar is better fitted for classical or scientific training, and he should be encouraged to make this discovery and act upon it.  I cannot help hoping that the manufacturer and man of commerce of the future will take a much greater interest than he does now in the schools from which he draws his workers.  When he does he will probably see the suicidal folly of taking boys from a secondary school to begin their apprenticeship at fourteen instead of allowing them to remain for the two most precious years of a boy’s life perhaps, at the secondary school, and offering him an apprenticeship at the age of sixteen. (p. 216)

As things are, because of this early age of apprenticeship, the fathers of bright lads, who pass from the elementary school to the secondary school, insist upon taking their boys away at the age of fourteen because they find that the employers will not give them any opening as apprentices at the age of sixteen.  And when our manufacturers really become interested in our secondary and technical schools I think we shall find that legislation in its turn will be made easy. (p. 216)

There is no doubt that this war has opened our eyes to the national need of some great central technical school or university for the iron and steel industry and engineering work of the land.  Of course there are technical schools run in connexion with industries in some of our great manufacturing centres, but if we are to hold our places in the engineering world there seems to be a real need for some great central school at which all the chemistry of metals, and the higher uses of iron and steel can be taught.  This is not a matter for private industrial enterprise.  It is a matter for the Government to undertake for the sake of the industry of the whole country, and they could not do a wiser thing at the end of this war, than to call the iron and steel experts, engineers, and manufacturers together and in consultation decide upon some great central iron and steel laboratory for the teaching of the whole nation. (p. 216)

(Education, 1916, 12 May, pp. 214-216)

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