f
popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and
investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must
now take the place of national defence. We shall have need of central
authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the
scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German
education, progress, and interchange of labour.[29]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 24: Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a
students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the
abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea
that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The
colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with
the addition of red.]

[Footnote 25: Geist.]

[Footnote 26: Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in
German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of.
In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.]

[Footnote 27: Ausbildung.]

[Footnote 28: A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and
goodness.]

[Footnote 29: Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent
later.]

XI

Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was
stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement,
which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society
had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers,
the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead
soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who
dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This
great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and
there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was
intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself
to be.

It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious
piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions
between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission.
It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of
sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was
indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand
others took back; what one hand received, a thousand others rejected.
The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was
merely that the conscien