Once people have been set thinking about these things they will never stop as they are. The mischief at present is that we take the most preposterous arrangements for granted because we are used to them. It will not be necessary to stir the venerable quiet, the tradition, and ripe usages of Oxford and Cambridge very greatly. Somewhere the fine traditions of classical scholarship and stylistic mathematics should be preserved, and these seem to be their appointed refuges. But there is now a constellation of other and more conveniently situated provincial Universities which are still miserably cramped and poor. For all that, several are doing quite first-class University work. And there exists now in London, in spite of neglect and misdirection, a great group of literary, artistic, scientific, and legal institutions which cry aloud to be grouped and correlated upon broad and congenial lines as the effective intellectual nucleus of the British Empire, and even perhaps of the English-speaking world. It is to the loosely co-ordinated institutions within and without the present so-called University of London that I hope Mr. Trevelyan will chiefly direct his attention as the apex of the pyramid I hope to see arising, based on the existing preparatory school, on the re-fashioned “Public School,” relieved of its too mature seniors, and on the revised and strengthened free Junior and Second schools which should take the place of our existing elementary schools. XXV PORTUGAL AND PROSPERITY: THE BLESSEDNESS OF BEING A LITTLE NATION 1.3.24 For several weeks just recently I was cut off from Britain and America and most of the things that interest me in the world by a postal strike in Portugal. It was an original sort of strike. The little dears went to their offices and so forth, and just did nothing until the Government kept a promise to raise salaries. Telegrams and letters coagulated in masses that are still incompletely dissolved. Some of the more humorous of the strikers mixed up the letters, and delivered considerable numbers at the wrong addresses, where many perished miserably. Meanwhile I read the Lisbon _Diario de Noticias_, which has about as much foreign news as the _West Sussex Gazette_, and meditated on Portugal. To which country I had come, by the by, because it was within three days’ post of England and a most convenient cable centre.