in distant lands under
unsuitably educated British officers of means and gentility with a
defective War Office equipment and inferior weapons has lost much of its
romantic glamour. But an unofficial body that set itself to the
establishment of a school of military science, to the sane organization
and criticism of military experiments in tactics and equipment, and to
the raising for experimental purposes of volunteer companies and
battalions, would find no lack of men.... What an unofficial syndicate
of capable persons of the new sort may do in these matters has been
shown in the case of the _Turbinia_, the germ of an absolute revolution
in naval construction.

Such attempts at unofficial soldiering would be entirely in the spirit
in which I believe the New Republic will emerge, but it is in another
line of activity that the growing new consciousness will presently be
much more distinctly apparent. It is increasingly evident that to
organize and control public education is beyond the power of a
democratic government. The meanly equipped and pretentiously conducted
private schools of Great Britain, staffed with ignorant and incapable
young men, exist, on the other hand, to witness that public education is
no matter to be left to merely commercial enterprise working upon
parental ignorance and social prejudice. The necessary condition to the
effective development of the New Republic is a universally accessible,
spacious, and varied educational system working in an atmosphere of
efficient criticism and general intellectual activity. Schools alone are
of no avail, universities are merely dens of the higher cramming, unless
the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and lecturers are in touch with
and under the light of an abundant, contemporary, and fully adult
intellectuality. At present, in Great Britain at least, the headmasters
entrusted with the education of the bulk of the influential men of the
next decades are conspicuously second-rate men, forced and etiolated
creatures, scholarship boys manured with annotated editions, and brought
up under and protected from all current illumination by the kale-pot of
the Thirty-nine Articles. Many of them are less capable teachers and
even less intelligent men than many Board School teachers. There is,
however, urgent need of an absolutely new type of school--a school that
shall be, at least, so skilfully conducted as to supply the necessary
training in mathematics, dialectics, lang