s it trained its
soldiers; the big businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind as
they manufactured material. English education was made compulsory; it
was made free; many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men laboured to
create a ladder of standards and examinations, which would connect the
cleverest of the poor with the culture of the English universities and
the current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be said
that the connection was very complete, or the achievement so thorough as
the German achievement. For whatever reason, the poor Englishman
remained in many things much as his fathers had been, and seemed to
think the Higher Criticism too high for him even to criticize.

And then a day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God that we had
failed. Education, if it had ever really been in question, would
doubtless have been a noble gift; education in the sense of the central
tradition of history, with its freedom, its family honour, its chivalry
which is the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace, in our
epoch, have actually learned if they had learned all that our schools
and universities had to teach? That England was but a little branch on a
large Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable spiritual sympathy,
all-encircling like the sea, had always made us the natural allies of
the great folk by the flowing Rhine; that all light came from Luther and
Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging Christianity of its
Greek and Roman accretions; that Germany was a forest fated to grow;
that France was a dung-heap fated to decay--a dung-heap with a crowing
cock on it. What would the ladder of education have led to, except a
platform on which a posturing professor proved that a cousin german was
the same as a German cousin? What would the guttersnipe have learnt as a
graduate, except to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an
Anglo-Saxon? The day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other
things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for
he had nothing to unlearn.

He in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred, and stepped
across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before men's eyes all
the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization;
then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had followed and
after what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor in any
story of mankind has the irony of God chos