Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction; Nuclear warfare -- Fiction; War stories
The new government early discovered the need of a universal education
to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made no
wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of
religious profession that at that time divided the earth into a
patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left these organisations to make
their peace with God in their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were
a mere secular truth that sacrifice was expected from all, that respect
had to be shown to all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all
around the world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of
war and the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was
taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of
the world from waste and contention was the common duty and occupation
of all men and women. These things which are now the elementary
commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to the councillors of
Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim them, marvellously daring
discoveries, not untouched by doubt, that flushed the cheek and fired
the eye.
The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of
a committee of men and women, which did its work during the next few
decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This educational
committee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and spiritual
side of the redistribution committee. And prominent upon it, and indeed
for a time quite dominating it, was a Russian named Karenin, who was
singular in being a congenital cripple. His body was bent so that he
walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at
last to undergo two operations. The second killed him. Already
malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle
ages so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature
of the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It
had a curious effect upon Karenin’s colleagues; their feeling towards
him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed
usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong face, with little
bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped
mouth. His skin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray.
He was at all times an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this
was forgiven him because of the hot wire of suffering that was
manifestly thrust through his being. At the end of his life his
personal prestige was very great. To him far more than to any
contemporary is it due that self-abnegation, self-identification with
the world spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That
general memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern
educational system, was probably entirely his work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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