718 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
English need apply.’ Every youth we export to you ought educationally to 
bear this label on his back: ‘ Every seed tested before being sent out.’ 
But above and beyond all there should be brought into the foreground 
a co-ordinated study of English language and English literature. Nothing 
impressed me more in my visit to the United States in 1903 as one of the 
Mosely Commission, than to observe how greatly the cultivated classes in the 
Federation outstripped our island-bred people in-the facility and power 
with which they manipulated the English tongue. Awkwardness, poverty 
of expression, and stammering utterance mark many Englishmen of high 
academic distinction. But the American who, on account of the incessant 
tide of immigration, has to assimilate the congeries of all the nations of the 
earth in the shortest possible space of time, has so co-ordinated the study 
of his ancestral tongue in the schools of his country, that the pupil emerges 
completely equipped for the use of persuasive and oratorical language 
wherein to express his thoughts and wherewith to gain his ends. 
In connection with this may I add that it was, indeed, a happy augury 
that, at the eve of the meeting of the British Association in this great 
Dominion, there should have been a gathering of delegates of the Imperial 
Press in the centre of our small island home. ‘Little they know of 
England, who only England know.’ The phenomenal, or rather abysmal 
ignorance of the geography and of the vastness of the productive power of the 
British Empire which exists among the upper and middle classes in 
England would be ludicrous if it were not so deplorable. The loyalty and 
devotion of the Colonies, right unto the utmost corners of the earth, admit 
of no dispute. It is observable on every hand and in every national crisis. 
The doubt is of the loyalty of the centre of the Empire towards its 
extremities, through the crass ignorance which exists as to the geographical 
and political meaning of that Empire. I would annihilate that 
ignorance, as aforesaid, by putting political, historical, and physical 
geography in the forefront of our educational system; by lectures from 
your able men in Canada, or Australia, and South Africa, vivified by lantern 
slides, and encouraged and endowed by the Mother Country. I would bring 
all visible means of presentment to bear on the education of childhood, boy- 
hood, and youth in the Motherland. 
Let me touch on one further educational factor of Imperialism. The 
sentiment of patriotism, unlike that of charity, is not equally capable of 
indefinite intension and extension. The peculiar system of education which 
finds vogue in England in most of our greatest institutions—the institutions 
from which are drawn the future leaders of the nation—is, as everyone 
knows, the barrack system, otherwise called the boarding system. It is not 
the time or place here to enlarge on the obvious advantages of that system, 
its unique characteristics, its power of moulding character and developing 
enterprise. But it has its cramping and confining side—it has a tendency 
to localise patriotism, to narrow a young man’s mental horizon, and to 
ignore whatever lies outside its immediate survey. Hence the abnormal 
and gladiatorial devotion to games and comparatively selfish amusements, 
which absorb, and, in my opinion, not seldom paralyse and stifle wider, 
more generous, more enlightened—in fine, more Imperial instincts. How- 
ever much in the field of sports the individual youth may subordinate his 
own self-regarding impulses to the welfare of the tiny community for which 
he is exercising his energies, his horizon is not wide enough to bid him 
rise to a sentiment of self-sacrifice and self-abandonment on behalf of a 
greater and more abstract ideal—love of Fatherland and loyalty to Empire. 
But it is a welcome thing to be able to point to a larger sentiment lately 
awakened in this direction. There is no doubt that the patriotic spirit in 
our schools and colleges has, from whatever cause, received a great impetus 
in the last two years, and that the general principles of an intelligent 
