I am not concerned to
discuss the education problem. Formal education, carried on chiefly by
means of books, is a very small part of the making of a man or a woman.
But I am interested to know what the children are thinking. You cannot
fathom a child's thoughts, but we know who are their best teachers, and
what lessons have been stamped indelibly on their minds. Their teachers,
whom they never saw, and whose lessons they will never forget, lie in
graves in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Syria and Mesopotamia,
or unburied at the bottom of the sea. The runner falls, but the torch is
carried forward. This is what Julian Grenfell, who gave his mind and his
life to the War, has said in his splendid poem called _Into Battle_:
And life is colour and warmth and light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting hath increase.
Those who died fighting will have such increase that a whole new
generation, better even than the old, will be ready, no long time hence,
to uphold and extend and decorate the Commonwealth of nations which
their fathers and brothers saved from ruin.
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