Supplemejii to '' N attire," March 13, 1902. 



" Already," he says, '' recruiting is falling off. • ■ • 

 Elementary education has at last raised the intelligence i 

 of the British lower classes to a point when the prospect 

 of fiyhtinj; in distant lands under unsuitably educated 

 British officers of means and gentility with a defective [ 

 War Office equipment and inferior weapons has lost \ 

 much of its romantic glamour." 



As to education, Mr. Wells holds, and very many, like 

 myself, will agree with him, that " it is increasingly 

 evident that to organise and control public education is 

 beyond the power of a democratic Government.'' 



" Schools alone are of no avail, universities are merely 

 dens of the higher cramming. ... At present, in Great 

 Britain at least, the headmasters entrusted with the 

 education of the bulk of the influential men of the next 

 decades are conspicuously second-rate men, forced and 

 etiolated creatures, scholarship boys manured with anno- 

 tated editions, and brought up under and protected from 

 all current illumination by the Kale-pot of the Thirty-nine 

 Articles. Many of them are less capable teachers and 

 even less intelligent men than many Board School 

 teachers." 



There is need, Mr. Wells declares, of a new type of 

 school and also of a new type of university, 



" something other than a happy fastness for those pre- 

 cociously brilliant creatures — creatures whose brilliance 

 is too often the hectic indication of a constitutional un- 

 soundness of mind — who can 'get in' before the port- 

 cullis of the nineteenth birthday falls." 



The coming men, those whom Mr. Wells calls the New 

 Republic, will do away with 



" the half-educated, unskilled pretenders, professing im- 

 possible creeds and propounding ridiculous curricula, to 

 whom the unhappy parents of to-day must needs entrust 

 the intelligences of their children. . . . The windy pre- 

 tences of 'forming character,' supplying moral training 

 and so forth, under which the educationalist of to-day 

 conceals the fact that he is incapable of his proper task 

 of training, developing and equipping the mind, will no 

 longer be made by the teacher. Nor will the teacher be 

 permitted to subordinate his duties to the entirely ir- 

 relevant business of his pupils' sports." Hereafter ''the 

 school and college will probably give only the keys and 

 apparatus of thought, a necessary language or so, a sound 

 mathematical training, drawing, a wide and reasoned 

 view of philosophy, some good exercises in dialectics, a 

 training in the use of those stores of fact that science has 

 made. So equipped the young man and young woman 

 will go on to the technical school of their chosen profes- 

 sion and to the criticism of contemporary practice for 

 their special efficiency and to the literature of contem- 

 porary thought for their general development." 



The value of literature and the great question of the 

 exclusive study of Greek and Latin writers are alluded 

 to thus ; — 



"After all, in spite of the pretentious impostors 

 who trade upon the claim, literature, contemporary 

 literature, is the breath of civilised life, and those who 

 sincerely think and write the salt of the social body. To 

 mumble over the past, to live on the classics, however 

 splendid, is senility.' 



Many readers will find the final chapter the most 

 interesting in this uncompromising book, where religion, 

 morals and philosophy are briefly but frankly touched. 

 NO. 1689, VOL. 65] 



The men of the New Republic will be, says Mr. Wells i 

 "religious" men, and we gather that he is one, a fore- 

 runner so to speak, of those new men. They will find 

 "an effect of purpose in the totality of things." That is 

 the essence of being "religious" and amounts to "belief 

 in God." They will "presume to no possibility of know- 

 ledge of the real being of God." They will reject the 

 conception of God as an omniscient mind as being as 

 impossible as that which presents Him as an omni- 

 present moving body. 



''They will regard the whole of being, within themselves 

 and without, as the sufficient revelation of God to their 

 souls." " The same spacious faith that will render the 

 idea of airing their egotisms in God's presence, through 

 prayer, or of any such quite personal intimacy, absurd, 

 will render the idea of an irascible and punitive Deity 

 ridiculous and incredible." "To believe completely in 

 God" (as these men will believe) "is to believe in the 

 final rightness of all being." " If" (and this is said in 

 comment on Huxley's Romanes lecture) "the universe is 

 non-ethical by our present standards, we must reconsider 

 these standards and reconstruct our ethics." 



Mr. Wells declares that no more " shattering " book 

 than the " Essay on Population " by Malthus has ever been 

 or ever will be written. Darwinism, as one outcome of 

 it, has destroyed the basis of old-fashioned doctrines. .A.n 

 outline is given of the religion of the men of the New 

 Republic. They will not seek to discover the final 

 object of the struggle among existences ; they will have 

 abandoned the search for ultimates. They will seek 

 God's purpose in the sphere of their activities and desire 

 no more. They will find in themselves a desire, a passion 

 almost, to create and organise, to put in order, to get the 

 maximum result from certain possibilities. These men 

 will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, "not 

 a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void." 

 They will, accordingly, not punish criminals by inflicting 

 pain, but will apply Nature's own method of improving 

 her stock — the method of killing. And equally they will 

 not encourage or applaud or support by charity (as many 

 persons do at present) 



" a mean-spirited, under-sized, diseased little man, quite 

 incapable of earning a decent living even for himself, 

 married to some underfed, ignorant, ill-shaped, plain and 

 diseased little woman and guilty of the lives of ten or 

 twelve ugly ailing children." "All Christian States of 

 to-day are, as a matter of fact, engaged in slave-breeding. 

 It is a result that endears religion and purity to the 

 sweating employer, and leads unimaginative bishops, who 

 have never missed a meal in their lives, and who know 

 nothing of the indescribable bitterness of a handicapped 

 entry into this world, to draw a complacent contrast with 

 irreligious France." 



It seems to me that this book should have — even for 

 those whom it cannot fail to offend — more than the 

 interest which attaches to clever fault-finding. It is, truly 

 enough, an unsparing mdictment of e.-iisting government, 

 society, education, religion and morality, but it contains 

 also a confession of faith and is full of a spirit of hope 

 and a belief in future development. It is a truthful state- 

 ment of the outlook of a man who has grasped thoroughly 

 the teachings of modern science and who still keeps hope 

 alive in his breast. E. R.w L.\nkester. 



