We cannot do too much
for them. The most that we can do is nothing to what they are going to
do for us, for their own nation and people. I am not concerned to
discuss the education problem. Formal education, carried on chiefly by
means of books, is a very small part of the making of a man or a woman.
But I am interested to know what the children are thinking. You cannot
fathom a child's thoughts, but we know who are their best teachers, and
what lessons have been stamped indelibly on their minds. Their teachers,
whom they never saw, and whose lessons they will never forget, lie in
graves in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Syria and Mesopotamia,
or unburied at the bottom of the sea. The runner falls, but the torch is
carried forward. This is what Julian Grenfell, who gave his mind and his
life to the War, has said in his splendid poem called _Into Battle_:

And life is colour and warmth and light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting hath increase.

Those who died fighting will have such increase that a whole new
generation, better even than the old, will be ready, no long time hence,
to uphold and extend and decorate the Commonwealth of nations which
their fathers and brothers saved from ruin.

One thing I have never heard discussed, but it is the clearest gain of
all, and already it may be called a certain gain. After the War the
English language will have such a position as it has never had before.
It will be established in world-wide security. Even before the War, it
may be truly said, our language was in no danger from the competition of
the German language. The Germans have never had much success in the
attempt to get their language adopted by other peoples. Not all the
military laws of Prussia can drive out French from the hearts and homes
of the people of Alsace. In the ports of the near and far East you will
hear English spoken--pidgin English, as it is called, that is to say, a
selection of English words suited for the business of daily life. But
you may roam the world over, and you will hear no pidgin German. Before
the War many Germans learned English, while very few English-speaking
people learned German. In other matters we disagreed, but we both knew
which way the wind was blowing. It may be said, and said truly, that our
well-known laziness was one cause of our failing or neglecting to learn
German. But it was not the only