At no time in the world’s experience has the need for a creative education been so manifest as it is to-day. This social and political system in which we live is ailing and divided against itself, failing to reconstitute even as much economic universalism as prevailed before the great war, involving itself in a hopeless muddle of debts. It is a system plainly doomed to a further series of wider and profounder disasters, unless amidst its distresses it can evolve a clearer realisation, not only in its ruling classes but generally, of the origins of our race and our civilisation, of the conditions under which our communities have grown, of the vital inter-relationships of our social order, and of the tremendous perils and the immense possibilities before mankind. A population with such a breadth of outlook, a population disciplined to creative constructive work, is not simply desirable to-day; it is imperatively demanded if civilisation is to avert a decay and a collapse as much greater than the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a modern liner is greater than an Alexandrian galley. It is because of his realisation of the paramount need of a great educational effort as the first and supreme thing in human affairs to-day that every intelligent man must needs note with something between dismay and bitter derision the recent signs of a revival of “classical” teaching in the schools and colleges of the Atlantic peoples. The French, who so love the eighteenth century that in foreign and domestic policy they are always trying to get back to it, have led the way. Disturbing modern subjects which tend to betray the facts that the Mediterranean Sea is not the whole world, and that most great events of present importance to mankind occurred before or outside of or in revolt against the Latin civilisation, are to be kept out of the purview of French adolescence. More Greek will be taught, but not enough of it and not well enough for the young Frenchman to realise how feeble was the political, social, and economic reaction of Greece upon Rome. He will be trained to think that there was some sort of magnificent succession between the two, whereas Rome got little from Greece except slave pedagogues and pedants, misleading literary models which crippled her own sturdier initiative, articles de luxe, living and dead, architects, sculptors and painters, and cared so little for the clarifying Aristotle that she left his books about and lost them.