In the next few years the future of the world will be decided for centuries to come. The battles of this war are only the first part of the contest between races, and between the ways of life for which those races stand. We believe that England, with its various peoples and communities scattered in islands and continents beyond the seas, stands for ways of life infinitely precious, the way of humanity, the way of liberty, the way of self-government, the way of good order based on toleration and kindly feeling, the way of peaceful industry. The final decision in this struggle will be found in the workshops of the world. It lies in your hands. Statesmen and emperors will only register the results which you have achieved. Your weapons will be skill, and energy, and knowledge. You will require a sane understanding of your own rights, and a sane understanding of the rights and the difficulties of other classes. The greatness of England will be your greatness, and its success your success. The arsenal for war is at Woolwich. This Polytechnic Institute is an arsenal for peace, where you can find the weapons for the conquest of your lives. CHAPTER IV THE MATHEMATICAL CURRICULUM (_Presidential Address to the London Branch of the Mathematical Association, 1912_) THE situation in regard to education at the present time cannot find its parallel without going back for some centuries to the break-up of the mediæval traditions of learning. Then, as now, the traditional intellectual outlook, despite the authority which it had justly acquired from its notable triumphs, had grown to be too narrow for the interests of mankind. The result of this shifting of human interest was a demand for a parallel shifting of the basis of education, so as to fit the pupils for the ideas which later in life would in fact occupy their minds. Any serious fundamental change in the intellectual outlook of human society must necessarily be followed by an educational revolution. It may be delayed for a generation by vested interests or by the passionate attachment of some leaders of thought to the cycle of ideas within which they received their own mental stimulus at an impressionable age. But the law is inexorable that education to be living and effective must be directed to informing pupils with those ideas, and to creating for them those capacities which will enable them to appreciate the current thought of their epoch. There is no such thing as a successful system of education in a vacuum, that is to say, a system which is divorced from immediate contact with the existing intellectual atmosphere. Education which is not modern shares the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.