NOTES 99 



and the official world, as it tied up the Report in red tape and 

 stuffed it into a pigeonhole, would have chuckled with satis- 

 faction at having once more befooled the nation by a stale but 

 infallible device. There the Report would have remained, 

 accumulating dust, until it was disinterred by some sub- 

 sequent Committee, appointed on a similar occasion, whose 

 Report would have been similarly disposed of in its turn. The 

 Reports of several previous Committees, long since forgotten, 

 and of course disregarded, are referred to in Cd. 901 1. I may 

 be unduly sanguine, but it does seem to me impossible that 

 the Report of this last Committee should be utterly disregarded. 

 It is so reasonable, so moderate, so convincing, so persuasive ; 

 it displays such a comprehensive grasp of the whole problem 

 of education ; that it must be exasperating indeed to the 

 mind of the official and the classical schoolmaster, hidebound in 

 the prevailing antiquated system ; and if it could only reach 

 the public at large, it must surely produce a great effect on the 

 public mind, preoccupied though it is with the conduct of 

 the war. 



We can imagine the Prime Minister of the day, a scholar 

 of Balliol, a man steeped in the Public School and Oxford tradi- 

 tion of the cult of uselessness and verbiage, accustomed both 

 in his primary profession of the law and in his subsequent pro- 

 fession of politics to regard words as omnipotent — we can 

 imagine him suddenly aroused by the war to a consciousness 

 that after all words are not everything ; that there are such 

 things in the world as hard facts, which no words will dissipate, 

 and which must be reckoned with ; we can hear him inquiring 

 whether there is anyone who knows anything about these 

 awkward, embarrassing, degraded things called facts, and 

 being told that there is a realm of knowledge called Science, 

 whose function it is to disregard words and to study the facts 

 that are symbolised by words ; and we can see him determining 

 reluctantly that after all perhaps it would be well to demean 

 his scholarship and his mastery of words by taking counsel of 

 those whose business it is to study, not words, but facts. Hence 

 the appointment of this Committee. 



The Committee was appointed to inquire into the position 

 occupied by Natural Science in the Educational System of 

 Great Britain, and to advise what measures are needed to 

 promote its study, and this the Committee has done ; but 



