nder the party system will be played by
elected representatives and Press respectively.]

VII. THE NEW EDUCATION

Some few months ago Mr. Harold Spender, in the _Daily News_, was calling
attention to a very significant fact indeed. The higher education in
England, and more particularly the educational process of Oxford and
Cambridge, which has been going on continuously since the Middle Ages,
is practically in a state of suspense. Oxford and Cambridge have
stopped. They have stopped so completely that Mr. Spender can speculate
whether they can ever pick up again and resume upon the old lines.

For my own part, as the father of two sons who are at present in
mid-school, I hope with all my heart that they will not. I hope that the
Oxford and Cambridge of unphilosophical classics and Little-go Greek for
everybody, don's mathematics, bad French, ignorance of all Europe except
Switzerland, forensic exercises in the Union Debating Society, and cant
about the Gothic, the Oxford and Cambridge that turned boys full of life
and hope and infinite possibility into barristers, politicians,
mono-lingual diplomatists, bishops, schoolmasters, company directors,
and remittance men, are even now dead.

Quite recently I passed through Cambridge, and, with the suggestions of
Mr. Spender in my mind, I paused to savour the atmosphere of the place.
He had very greatly understated the facts of the case. He laid stress
upon the fact that instead of the normal four thousand undergraduates or
so, there are now scarcely four hundred. But before I was fairly in
Cambridge I realised that that gives no idea of the real cessation of
English education. Of the first seven undergraduates I saw upon the
Trumpington road, one was black, three were coloured, and one of the
remaining three was certainly not British, but, I should guess,
Spanish-American. And it isn't only the undergraduates who have gone.
All the dons of military age and quality have gone too, or are staying
up not in caps and gowns, but in khaki; all the vigorous teachers are
soldiering; there are no dons left except those who are unfit for
service--and the clergy. Buildings, libraries, empty laboratories, empty
lecture theatres, vestiges, refugees, neutrals, khaki; that is Cambridge
to-day.

There never was before, there never may be again, so wonderful an
opportunity for a cleaning-up and sweeping-out of those two places, and
for a profitable new start in British education.