says. _Mankind in the Making_ dealt very
largely with education directed to a particular end, but in the book I
am now considering may be found certain outlets for the expression of
the less consistently strenuous. Education, whether of individual
children in the home or regarded as a function of the State, offers
continual perplexities that only the most resolute can confront day by
day with renewed zeal; the problems of collective ownership are less
confused by psychology, and the broad principles may be adopted and
the energy of the young believer directed towards the accomplishment
of minor detail. He may, for example, find good reason for the
nationalising of the milk supply without committing himself to any
broader theory of expropriation.

Finally I come to the collection of various papers issued in 1914
under the title _An Englishman Looks at the World_--a book that I may
pass with the comment that it exhibits Mr Wells in his more captious
moods, deliberately more captious in some instances, no doubt,
inasmuch as the various papers were written for serial
publication--and that _Confession of Faith and Rule of Life_,
published in 1907 as _First and Last Things_. The opening is
unnecessarily complicated by the exposition of a metaphysic that is
quite uncharacteristic and has little to do with the personal
exposition that follows; and, indeed, I feel with regard to the whole
work that it attempts to define the indefinable. I deprecate the note
of finality implied in the title. "It is as it stands now," I read in
the Introduction, "the frank confession of what one man of the early
Twentieth Century has found in life and himself," but that man has
found much since then, and will continue to find much as he grows
continually richer in experience. So that while no student of Wells'
writings can afford to overlook _First and Last Things_, I would warn
him against the danger of concluding that in that book he will find at
last the ultimate expression of character and belief, set out in the
form of a categorical creed. Again I find a spirit and overlook the
letter. I choose to take as representative such a passage as the
following, with all its splendid vagueness and lack of dogma, rather
than a definite expression of belief that Mr Wells does not believe in
a personal immortality. This passage runs: "It seems to me that the
whole living creation may be regarded as walking in its sleep, as
walking in the sleep of individ