Schools and Universities are surely the most paradoxical things in the whole preposterous spectacle of human life. They exist to prepare youth for a world of enormous changes, and their chief activity seems to be, at Oxford and Cambridge quite as much as at Harvard and Yale, to get youth apart from the world and conceal the forces of change from its curious and intelligent eyes. The youth of the Universities in particular should be the living eggs of the good new things of the days to come. The efforts of the governing bodies everywhere seem to be directed chiefly to getting them hard-boiled. My congratulations to Mr. Corliss Lamont for having so far escaped the culinary process. Nowadays there are Corliss Lamonts from China to Peru. The matter and the forms change but the spirit is the same. In Moscow they have to fight as hard as anywhere else; there it is to escape being made into hard-boiled Communists. By virtue of the rebellious vitality in our youth this world of mankind lives on and does not die and freeze into a monument to its Founders. XLII THE LAWLESSNESS OF AMERICA AND THE WAY TO ORDER 21.6.24 Miss Rebecca West, that acute and brilliant observer, has recently been in America, and she has been writing her impressions of the American scene. She has been lecturing and hand-shaking, but with commendable restraint she says little of her audiences, her hotels, and her railway journeys. She has looked over the heads of her hearers and out of the carriage windows. She has looked at the great spectacle as a whole, and she generalises about it broadly and bravely. The lack of civil order is the thing that strikes her most, and she illustrates her perception of it by a vivid and illuminating discussion of the necessity for prohibition and its consequent evils, and of the colour trouble in the South. Various previous British visitors have noted that lack in other terms, have remarked upon the want of a sense of the State in American thought, and of the reaction upon humanity of the fierce, untutored naturalness, the wide deserts, the undisciplined rivers, and spontaneous tangled forest growths of the New World. But when she looks for the forces that will presently bring order and graciousness into this characteristically splendid display of energy at large she calls rather startlingly for peasants. She thinks, in a phrase that might have come straight from something by Chesterton, that “nameless men who plough furrows that are straight and deep,” peasants in bulk and multitude, are needed to establish a permanent social order, an enduring and developing civilisation.