of others besides the seamen of England who will have no dealings with
an unsubdued and unrepentant Germany. What the Germans are not taught by
the War they will have to learn in the more tedious and no less costly
school of peace.
In any case, whether we win through to real peace and real security, or
whether we are thrown back on an armed peace and the duty of unbroken
vigilance, we shall be dependent for our future on the children who are
now learning in the schools or playing in the streets. It is a good
dependence. The children of to-day are better than the children whom I
knew when I was a child. I think they have more intelligence and
sympathy; they certainly have more public spirit. We cannot do too much
for them. The most that we can do is nothing to what they are going to
do for us, for their own nation and people. I am not concerned to
discuss the education problem. Formal education, carried on chiefly by
means of books, is a very small part of the making of a man or a woman.
But I am interested to know what the children are thinking. You cannot
fathom a child's thoughts, but we know who are their best teachers, and
what lessons have been stamped indelibly on their minds. Their teachers,
whom they never saw, and whose lessons they will never forget, lie in
graves in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Syria and Mesopotamia,
or unburied at the bottom of the sea. The runner falls, but the torch is
carried forward. This is what Julian Grenfell, who gave his mind and his
life to the War, has said in his splendid poem called _Into Battle_:
And life is colour and warmth and light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting hath increase.
Those who died fighting will have such increase that a whole new
generation, better even than the old, will be ready, no long time hence,
to uphold and extend and decorate the Commonwealth of nations which
their fathers and brothers saved from ruin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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