ntry places in Scotland are made unfit for country life by a false
education, and, through its neglect of their higher needs, many of them
are ruined. A nation that spends five millions a day on war would not
in its education system provide for the social and moral needs of its
sons and daughters. It sacrificed everything to the brain. And the
result has been desolation in many a family in Scotland in lonely glens
and by the sea. Our education machinery has, in truth, been
Prussianised, and in the process the soul has been grievously wounded.
The class that provided the ministers of religion in wide stretches of
Scotland, provides {75} them no more. A generation of boys left to the
moral influences of the street corners, undisciplined and disregarded,
can provide the nation with clerks and not with leaders in the sphere
of the soul.

IV

There is no sign that the nation is waking to the misery wrought by the
bureaucrats. All the cry is for a further march along the same road.
The Government have in these last days appointed two Commissions on
Education, the one to 'inquire into the position occupied by natural
science,' and the other 'into the position occupied by the study of
modern languages,' in the educational system, and they are to consider
the matter, the one in relation to the 'interests of the trades,
industries, and professions' dependent on science, and the other in
relation to the 'interests of commerce and public service.' In this
there is no hint that what the nation mostly needs is the development
of character, the re-enforcement of soul. We are to investigate with
{76} our eye on commerce; the material gain is still our goal. The
Germanised minds have won their first victory. The future path of our
development is to be the path of the Teuton, and we are to tread it
like him, sacrificing our souls to Mammon. For the sake of commerce we
must go on pushing our boys faster up the ladder, heedless of debris of
moral wreckage at its foot!

A still more depressing symptom is the policy already adumbrated by the
Government to mitigate the devastation wrought in the country places.
Our armies now number millions, but the Government introduces a bill to
settle a few hundred soldiers on the land! Millions of acres lie
waste, but the Government proposes to deal with a few thousand acres
here and there. The needs of the future require an exodus from the
Egypt of the slums and from the slavery of tha