224 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
with the inevitable political bias that his membership in his party involves, 
and dependent for the tenure of his office on the fate of his party on purely 
political issues: the century proves that Education Bills do not destroy 
Ministries, but neither, however excellent, can they save them; hence, 
most party Education Ministers with political ambitions have to make 
their reputations elsewhere than at the Board of Education, because 
whether they are good or bad ministers of Education, they will only stay 
in their office if their party staysin power. In 1931, as in 1831, Education 
can only be kept out of politics by the determination of every party in 
turn not to allow an educational issue to jeopardise its general political 
fortunes. One issue, the so-called religious issue, alone threatens this. 
In 1931 as in 1831 I observe that no Government will tackle it fairly and 
squarely, because a courageous solution of it would be unlike successful 
operations in surgery ; the operation would succeed, the Nation would 
recover, and the operating surgeon, the Minister, would die. 
‘In 1831 we talked and dreamed of a national system of education. 
You are still talking and dreaming of it, but I begin to suspect that you 
(as we) were deluded by a catchword, cribbed by misunderstanding France 
and Germany. For national can have two very distinct interpretations 
which we jumble up—it is either a comprehensive unitary system, em- 
bracing every branch of educational effort controlled by a single national 
authority, however differentiated and delegated the powers of the sub- 
authorities and local organisations may be, or a system expressing the 
national character of the political community in accordance with its 
traditional principles and attitude to all national problems. 
‘One feature in this hundred years,’ Rip Van Winkle proceeds, ‘is 
amazingly significant—the reform of the old, and the development of the 
new, Universities, almost wholly endowed by private and voluntary 
benefactions. They are all literally co-educational. Mrs. Rip Van Winkle 
is even more astonished than I am, for she was with Miss Becky Sharp 
at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy. But what puzzles and grieves her is not that 
girls should have their Etons and Winchesters or go to a University and 
become a Mistress of Arts or a Bachelor of Commerce, but that in a 
century which has laboured so incessantly to secure rights for married 
women and which rightly regards motherhood as one of the fundamental 
bases of what you call sane and sound citizenship, you have, also, laboured 
so hard to secure that girls and young women should almost universally 
be taught and controlled by spinsters. You seem to regard marriage in a 
man as enriching, but in a woman as impoverishing, the experience of life 
and capacity for service. You put married men at the head of your 
Universities, Colleges and Schools, because you like the best of them, in 
the interests of the race, to marry; but you do not put married women 
in the same position, because apparently you wish to encourage the fools 
and the fribbles to marry, while the ablest women are subsidised to remain 
single—of course in the interests of the race. 
‘To proceed; why when we are still a commercial and industrial 
nation have you done little or nothing scientifically to educate boys, 
girls, young men and young women for commerce and industry, par- 
ticularly when you have done marvels for scientific research and all the . 
professions, law, medicine, engineering, teaching, the religious ministry, 
