Should we not rather trust it coherently and as a whole to the finest spirits and broadest minds in the country; to spirits that can be relied on to hold, and to minds that can be relied on to apply, a really high ideal; relied on, too, _to select and train the best men available for the propagation of that Ideal_? If by some democratic process we could sift out these minds from among us, and endow them with wholesale powers of selection, appointment, and training of teachers, we should have established a sort of endless band on which might travel a perpetual vitalizing current of the best feeling within us. To find these finest spirits and broadest minds we might conceivably use the existing representative machinery of Parliament, or some reformed representative system; or we might institute a special straining and sifting process, by means of plebiscite within plebiscite, till we were reasonably sure of arriving at the men best fitted to be entrusted with a high, coherent plan of education. We have, then, to found and place under their guidance a great training college, wherein the higher leaders of education may be imbued with the new spirit, trained in the new standards, and pass out, as posts fall vacant, to the headship of schools and colleges. And if it be objected, as it certainly will, that this is to constitute a too rigid spiritual bureaucracy, the answer is two-fold: This is the plan on which you order all your political, your material life, without regarding it as in the least dangerous or undemocratic. And, secondly, you have at present exactly the same bureaucratic methods of appointment in education, only they are exercised in a hole-and-corner manner, quite incoherently, and _without any democratic check at all_. There is no revolution in this idea, and it will certainly prove no immediate or quack remedy. It is, in few words, a suggestion that we should adopt for spiritual things, for states of mind, the method that, roughly speaking, we have found works best in material matters. Democracy will never really flourish till it has taken charge, and that right heartily, of its own spirituality. Life itself is the best education in spirituality a nation gets. But the plea here is only for better machinery to express and direct the experience and latent good-will which is implicit within the nation, and is not now brought out into the light for the nation’s service. We are living in a parched field under which there is plenty of water, but we have sunk no well, put up no pumping gear, with which to make our pasture green. Is the notion that we can still do this a preposterous dream, a mere presumptuous counsel of perfection?