DISCOVERY 



15 



unduly exhausting work — insecurity of employment, 

 lack of holiday's. On all these conditions the workers 

 themselves are coming to be acutely conscious. They 

 realize that modern industry tends to become more 

 and more mechanical, that it provides less educational 

 interest in the work itself, and offers httle opportunity 

 to satisfy intellectual, social, or artistic impulses. 

 They demand " industrial control " on the ground that 

 industrial democracy is as essential to individual free- 

 dom as is political democracy. Present social condi- 

 tions also stand in the way. Inadequate housing, 

 (nearly half the population living more than one to 

 a room), squalid surroundings, low wages, especiall}' in 

 rural districts, lack of village halls or public rooms — 

 all these create a vicious circle to which the women 

 are tied down even more than the men. These condi- 

 tions call for refonn on moral and social grounds ; 

 while it is obvious that they are vicious also on economic 

 grounds. For no one can doubt that we are at a 

 turning-point in our national history. A new era has 

 come upon us. We cannot stand still. We cannot 

 return to the old ways, the old abuses, the old 

 stupidities. As with our international relations, so 

 with the relations of classes and individuals inside 

 our own nation ; if they do not henceforth get better, 

 they must needs get worse, and that means moving 

 towards an abyss. It is in our power to make the new 

 era one of such progress as to repay us even for the 

 immeasurable cost, the price in lives lost, in manhood 

 crippled, and in homes desolated. 



Only by rising to the height of our enlarged vision 

 of social duty, can we do justice to the spirit generated 

 in our people by the long effort of common aspiration 

 and common suffering. To allow this spirit to die 

 away unused would be a waste compared to which 

 the material waste of the war would be a little thing ; 

 it would be a national sin, unpardonable in the eyes 

 of our posterity. We stand at the bar of history for 

 judgment, and we shall be judged by the use we make 

 of this unique opportunity. It is unique in many 

 ways, most of all in the fact that the public not only 

 has its conscience aroused and its heart stirred, but 

 also has its mind open and receptive of new ideas to an 

 unprecedented degree. 



It is not the lack of goodwill that is to be feared. 

 But goodwill without mental effort, without intelligent 

 provision, is worse than ineffectual ; it is a moral 

 opiate. The real lack in our national history has been 

 the lack of bold and clear thinking. We have been 

 well-meaning, we have had good principles ; where we 

 have failed is in the courage and foresight to carry out 

 our principles into our corporate Ufe. 



This corporate life itself has only been made visible 

 and real to us (as on a fiery background) by the glow 

 and illumination of the war. We have been made 



conscious that we are heirs to a majestic inheritance, 

 and that we have corresponding obligations. We 

 have awakened to the splendid qualities that were 

 latent in our people, the rank and file of the common 

 people who before this war were often adjudged to be 

 decadent, to have lost their patriotism, their religious 

 faith, and their response to leadership ; we were 

 even told they were physically degenerate. Now we 

 see what potentialities lie in these people, and what a 

 charge lies upon us to give to these powers free-play. 

 There is stirring through the whole country' a sense of 

 the duty we owe to our children, and to our grand- 

 children, to save them, not only from the repetition of 

 such a world-war and from the burdens of a crushing 

 militarism, but to save them also from the obvious 

 peril of civil dissension at home. We owe it also to 

 our own dead that they shall not have died in vain, 

 but that their sacrifice shall prove to have created a 

 better England for the future generation. 



Though education in this sense was so vital a need, 

 3'et the ordinary Englishman had never realized it. 

 He regarded it as a subject inherently dull and drj', 

 because it was too " bookish," too much absorbed in 

 the technique and mechanics of the art. It was 

 " finished " at about eighteen. Indeed, for the mass 

 of the population education finished before fourteen, 

 and naturally education which ceased then was forgot- 

 ten before eighteen. The mass of the eighteen-year- 

 old recruits were found unable to write a simple letter, 

 unable to do a simple sum, and hardly able to read even 

 the simplest book; but with the new Education -Act, 

 adult education starts at a new level, and also demands 

 wholly new methods. It must begin with the existing 

 avocations and interests of the youth, to show the 

 reasons that underlie his daily work, the relation of his 

 work to that of others, and its place in the service 

 of the nation and of the world. In the Army Camps 

 from February 1917, recruits of eighteen from the 

 woollen district might be seen learning where the 

 different kinds of wool come from, what has been the 

 history of the industry, what are the quahties which 

 make wool the best clothing, what mechanical means 

 are used on it, and what principles are embodied 

 in the machines in wool-factories ; and so in other 

 cases we have to begin not with abstractions but with 

 the concrete objects, and work back to the rationale 

 of them. 



To see all this coming out of the army was like a 

 modern version of Samson's riddle : " Out of the eater 

 came forth meat ! " Mr. Fisher, indeed, has said, with 

 one of his happy audacities, that it is a new departure 

 as epoch-making as was gunpowder in military history. 

 For a whole group of discoveries are involved in it ; 

 that a modem army may be the means of training a 

 whole population in that physical efficiency and mental 



