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 u