of her simple
heart. In an abstracted, anxious way, she ate a couple of crumpets and
a wedge of cake with almond icing, and was comforted.

We continued our discussion of the war--or rather Leonard, for with her
Leonard seemed to be the war. She made some remark deliciously inept--I
wish I could remember it. I made a sly rejoinder. She sat bolt upright
and a flush came into her Dresden-china cheek and her old eyes flashed.

"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