Most politicians have still to learn the significance of the women’s vote. Because one or two pretty ladies on the Labour side have lost their heads, adorned themselves in trains and ostrich feathers, given themselves over to the photographers and interviewers and succumbed to the delightful temptation of patronising the Queen, it does not follow that the mass of Labour women are not intensely sane and realist. Sexual questions are coming into politics, and they are coming to stay. Before the next election every parliamentary candidate will have to make up his mind whether he stands for knowledge or ignorance in this matter. XLI BLINKERS FOR FREE YOUTH: YOUNG AMERICA ASKS TO HEAR AND SEE 14.6.24 A sure way to madden Americans is to make comparisons between education in the United States and in Western Europe. Even if the comparison is flattering it leaves them mad. Apparently belief in the superior education of the American citizen is becoming as sacred as belief in the American constitution. Doubt is prohibited. Visitors to the United States may presently have to sign a form about it. Hitherto with an extraordinary discretion I have avoided, or at least skirted, this sensitive point. I propose to continue to skirt it. There has been one exception. I touched upon the sore place a little while ago in a book called _The Dream_, and my mail from America came for some weeks bristling with an unwonted and distressing hostility. I gave an account of the elementary school teaching of England--it is much the same stuff, more or less, in most civilised countries--as I think it will appear to an observer a few centuries ahead. I added casually that on the whole the American rural school was worse than the English one I described. To the best of my knowledge and belief it is worse. In many parts of the United States the elementary education is far below the Western European level, the consequent illiteracy is shocking, and I should not be doing my duty as a writer for the English-speaking public if I did not say so. I was not thinking so much of new districts inhabited by fresh immigrants, but of old, native-born American regions, like Kentucky. The United States is abnormally slack about its elementary education, and needs plain, stimulating speech in the matter. But the Americans are in a state of irritable self-satisfaction about their schools. They are refusing almost violently to know that their general education has not kept pace with their enormous increase in wealth and material civilisation. Morally, if not legally, I am as much a citizen of the United States of America as of the British Empire; mentally the American and British worlds are two hemispheres of one brain; I cannot think of them functioning independently, and it is just as much my business to discuss this American slackness as it is to