LAND AND ^\ A i K R . 
January 6, 1916.; 
n business. And above all we don't honour our 
own prophets. One of our foremost artists, a 
brilliant colourist, relates how he had been com- 
missioned by a German manufacturer to produce a 
design for a car-pet at a fee of two hundred guineas. 
He declared that he had never been offered a larger 
sum than ten guineas by an English manufacturer. 
Yet the English man of business has not, to say the 
least, the reputation of being less generous than his 
German rival. It is merely that he has not the 
curiosity to discover, or the imagination to employ 
suitabh' the high talent which^ happens to be at 
his command. 
This manner of dealing \nth our prophets is of 
course notorious. America and Germany wel- 
comed the teaching of \\'illiam Morris in the sphere 
of printing, and besidts approving if for its own 
artistic values, also contrived to turn it into 
dollars and marks. Whereupon, characteristic- 
ally enough, our men of business began to take an 
interest in the revived craft thus presented tousrm 
these refracting media. We possess to-day the most 
distinguished formal calligi-apher in Emope. No 
English typefounder has thought it worth while to 
put him to the task of designing a new type. He 
has been commissioned to produce four or five 
such designs for German houses. The mournful 
story of the aniline dyes is too clearly in e\ery- 
body's memory to need comment. The incredible 
neglect of Science by Government on the (mic 
hand and by manufacturers on the other is the 
joke of Europe. The history of modern British 
commerce is largely a history of lost opportunity 
due to lack of imagination. 
If we turn to development the story is much 
the same. We note the contrast of the co-opera- 
tive dairj- farming movements of Holland and 
Denmark with our own. Denmark's success is 
particularly significant as she wrests her triumph 
from a harder climate. The garden of England 
and the incredible Kentish railways make another 
mournful parable. The neglect of the fisheries is a 
signal instance of the failure of national imagina- 
tion, as also is the tolerance of the vagaries of the 
fishmarket. As to agriculture, the partial and 
gratifying success of Sir Horace Plunkett in 
Ireland is more than balanced by its all but 
entire failure in Great Britain, a failure due to 
apathy and mutual suspicions. We might 
profitably note the sublime recklessness by which 
we have allowed and still allow almost un- 
diminished the waste of fuel which is represented 
by incomplete combustion in open household fires 
and the antiquated furnaces used in industry' — a 
waste which brings in its train other wastes such 
as fogs, involving darkness and therefore extra 
consumption of artificial light, delays innumer- 
able, depreciation of buildings, the by no means 
negligible menace to health, and the pro\-ed 
stunting of vegetation — besides all the dirt, gloom, 
and extra household work involved. The damning 
facts are not in dispute and the battle for sanity 
is carried on mainly by a small (if sturdy) private 
society. As one characteristic result of its acti- 
\-ities, a firm, successfully prosecuted for the 
nuisance of emitting black smoke and fighting the 
action with bitterness — saved some £3,500 a year 
in its coal bill by the enforced change to scientific 
combustion furnaces. 
Contemplate a city iike i^oncion, Mecca of 
pilgrims of all the. world, and \on find it all but 
uncatalogued ; its streets frequently unnamed, its 
public services difticult to find, its houses un- 
juunbered, or, if numbered, then so inconspicuoush' 
that the numbers are invisible by night when most 
wanted. The District Railway with its carefully 
thought-out signs, maps, arrows, and coded colour 
schemes, alone seems to have set an example of 
rational order. 
The general conditions are strangely similar 
to those already noted in industry. \Ve have the 
essential services and amenities but we have not 
taken the trouble to make them completely 
available. " You Britishers don't finish anything." 
And while London is in the picture, a glance may 
be spared for the preposterous waste of its municipal 
government, its o\Trlapping and conflicting au- 
thorities. And we may recall the bitter, un- 
imaginative opposition to the unification of its 
electrical system and the refusal to face the problem 
of the co-ordination of its railways and goods 
distribution. 
A good deal of all this is no doubt the ex- 
travagance of a careless rich man not to be troubled 
with small economies. The shock of war will 
effect greater changes in habit and outlook than 
can ever be compassed by reflection. 
Will it shake us from that supreme indifference 
to the things of the mind which has left us hitherto 
content with the least intelligent national educa- 
tion policy in Western Europe ? Perhaps it would 
not be fair to press too far the fact that the chief 
war economy conceived by the Government of 
London should be the docking of its education 
grant. But it is true beyond dispute that the 
whole national system has been starved b}- neglect. 
Our rich men purchase honours instead of de- 
serving them by possessing the zeal and discretion 
necessary to endow colleges and chairs. Parha- 
ment is indift'erent. 
To take just a single random instance, 
the .project of a Museum of Science which should 
provide opportunity and apparatus for students 
to carry on their studies and experiments, urgently 
recommended by a Royal Commission in the 
early seventies— is still a project ! There are a 
few posts of honour, a few considerable emoluments 
at the top of the scholastic profession ; but both pay 
and status in the rank and file, whether in higher 
or elementary education, have been a disgrace to a 
wealthy country. In particular the treatment 
of the elementary teachers, working in the main 
with a fine zeal against the heavy discouragements 
of grotesquely overcrowded classes and painfully 
restricted standard of life, deserves the severest 
c:ondemnation. The educational ladder is seem- 
ingly constructed so that as few as possible shall 
be enabled to climb by it. 
'Vhat we have starved in our abundance we 
must feed in our povert\-. It is for plain citizens to 
thmk out the implications of this fatal flaw in our 
national structure so that when we rebuild we 
ma\- build on surer foundations. 
n .■• c ,M:"""' (^''airman of the Sub-Committee of tlie 
1 iihhc Schools Alpine .Sports Club, mentions that liis Com- 
mittee has accepted an offer of the Palace Hotel, Montana (in 
Switzerland), to place that hotel ac 'their disposal, rent free, 
during the winter for the reception of convalescent officers. 
A charge will be made to each officer of 6s. 6d. per day to 
cover co.st of food and other expanses, and friends who 
accompany them will pay «s. per dav. 'ihose who would like 
to avail themselves of this arrangement should write to Lady 
\\aterl<.w r, Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead. who is the 
llonorarv Secrotarv ol the Sub-rommittce 
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