s able to place it
all within my sphere--its ideas, its causes, and its effects have
become or are becoming the familiar forms and shapes, in the midst of
which I am, like a spider at the centre of its web, placed with my
hands on every thread. And this is that dream.

Full of life and happiness I set out with another, one who was a friend
and had lived with me for a time, sharing the same hopes, methods, and
ideals. Laughing as we went, with the smiling world around us and the
glad faces of those we knew, we made our way to the house of one who,
older than ourselves, had inspired and befriended in us those hopes and
ideals. And there we learnt from him that the authorities of the
community, the institution to which we belonged, had taken offence at
our methods and by suppressing them had destroyed our aims and all that
was most dear to us. As we sat there in silence, my mind cast back
over the time--it was little more than a year--since our outlook had
been entirely changed. I saw the school a throbbing piece of mechanism
with its bells, its clocks, and its governors, set down in a place of
great beauty. Blind to anything of beauty, it worked with a rhythm and
a precision which became a twentieth-century development (although it
had been set up in 1557, and was still running on very nearly its
original lines--which was the reason, so they say, of why it "worked"
so "well"). I saw it at work and was myself made part of its raw
material. Into its hungry mouth there went childhood at its best, full
of energy, with every kind of ability, talent and promise, enterprise
and ambition; through its teeth, its moulds, and its classrooms they
passed, until they issued from the end a single and singular type of
humanity, moulded, stamped, docketed and numbered--to take their place,
or rather, and this is the saddest note of all, their very numerous and
different places in the world.

While this was passing through my mind we got up and went out for a
walk.

And then there came the War, and the men and institutions of Europe
were put to a supreme test. And the immediate result was that men
began to think, began to look about them, and realising the palpable
evil of war, began to wonder whether they had not been mistaken in
their values and systems. Men soon came to realise that they did not
fulfil their entire duty if they followed as nearly as possible in the
footsteps of their great-grandfathers, but that as the worl