242 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



is now one community. I believe that the crazy combative patriotism 

 that plainly threatens to destroy civilisation to-day is very largely begotten 

 by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They 

 take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and 

 fix its barbarism. I think we underrate the formative effect of this 

 perpetual reiteration of how we won, how our Empire grew and how 

 relatively splendid we have been in every department of life. We are 

 blinded by habit and custom to the way it infects these growing minds 

 with the chronic and nearly incurable disease of national egotism. Equally 

 mischievous is the furtive anti-patriocism of the leftish teacher. I suggest 

 that we take on our history from the simple descriptive anthropology 

 of the elementary stage to the story of the early civilisations. We are 

 dealing here with material that was not even available for the school- 

 masters and mistresses who taught our fathers. It did not exist. But 

 now we have the most lovely stuff to hand, far more exciting and far more 

 valuable than the quarrels of Henry II and a Becket or the peculiar un- 

 pleasantnesses of King James or King John. Archaeologists have been 

 piecing together a record of the growth of the primary civilisations and 

 the developing roles of priest, king, farmer, warrior, the succession of 

 stone and copper and iron, the appearance of horse and road and shipping 

 in the expansions of those primordial communities. It is a far finer 

 story to tell a boy or girl and there is no reason why it should not be told. 

 Swinging down upon these early civilisations came first the Semitic- 

 speaking peoples and then the Aryan-speakers. Persian, Macedonian, 

 Roman followed one another, Christendom inherited from Rome and 

 Islam from Persia, and the world began to assume the shapes we know 

 to-day. This is great history and also in its broad lines it is a simple 

 history — upon it we can base a lively modern intelligence, and now it 

 can be put in a form just as comprehensible and exciting for the school 

 phase as the story of our English kings and their terrestrial, dynastic and 

 sexual entanglements. When at last we focus our attention on the British 

 Isles and France we shall have the affairs of these regions in a proper 

 proportion to the rest of the human adventure. And our young people 

 will be thinking less like gossiping court pages and more like horse- 

 riders, seamen, artist-artisans, road-makers and city builders, which 

 I take it is what in spirit we want them to be. Measured by the great 

 current of historical events, English history up to quite recent years is 

 mere hole-and-corner history. 



And I have to suggest another exclusion. We are telling our young 

 people about the real past, the majestic expansion of terrestrial events. 

 In these events the little region of Palestine is no more than a part of the 

 highway between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Is there any real reason 

 nowadays for exaggerating its importance in the past } Nothing began 

 there, nothing was worked out there. All the historical part of the Bible 

 abounds in wild exaggeration of the importance of this little strip of land. 

 We were all brought up to believe in the magnificence of Solomon's temple 

 and it is a startling thing for most of us to read the account of its decorations 

 over again and turn its cubits into feet. It was smaller than most barns. 

 We all know the peculiar delight of devout people when, amidst the endless 

 remains of the great empires of the past, some dubious fragment is found to 



