icism; and a criticism which
seems to gather weight as we look about us and observe the terrible
results which have occurred when the State has been allowed to
manipulate opinion for its own ends. No Englishman will need to have
the lesson of Germany brought home to him; he knows too well how
inculcation through the schools of the worst type of narrow patriotism,
rendered seemingly noble by a deliberate falsification of history, has
warped the generosity which all children, German or other, possess,
into a pitiful acquiescence in every form of intellectual and moral
vileness. But in England, too, the danger signals are not wanting. We
have observed the people falling more and more under the sway of one
man's ideas, carried by his Press into every town and village of the
countryside: we have noticed that complete independence does not appear
always to exist as between the Press and the men who are responsible
for the gravest acts of public policy; and some of us do not much like
what we have seen. Are we then to help forward the forces making for
our own Prussianisation? We desire to see Politics taught by masters
of every shade of political opinion, so that the boys may have all the
materials from which to form an independent judgment; but will not the
State see to it, as it grows more and more powerful, that only those
men are allowed to become, or to remain, schoolmasters, who will teach
a doctrine not abhorrent to the powers that be? Those who know the
public schools will not be at a loss to understand how such a
consummation could be achieved. Even now there is the pressure of
parents, members of the financial or political wing of the ruling
class--a pressure few head masters are big enough to resist. And in
the future--to take only one instance--may not Conscription remain, and
the Government exercise a direct control through the medium of the
O.T.C.?

And as one writes these words; as one sees the ghastly prospect of more
and more State control, more and more authoritarianism and docility,
less and less of the free co-operation which is the very life-blood of
society, one sees also that the only way in which we can prevent the
remedy we have proposed from becoming another instrument in the hands
of our enemies, is simply by adopting that remedy itself. We must
break in on the vicious circle while and how we can. For why is there
a danger of our instrument of education being turned into an instrument
of