, the Taal, a hundred Indian and other Eastern
tongues, Canadian French--but I mean that also English must be
available, that everywhere there must be English teaching. And everyone
who wants to read science or history or philosophy, to come out of the
village life into wider thoughts and broader horizons, to gain
appreciation in art, must find ready to hand, easily attainable in
English, all there is to know and all that has been said thereon. It is
worth a hundred Dreadnoughts and a million soldiers to the Empire, that
wherever the imperial posts reach, wherever there is a curious or
receptive mind, there in English and by the imperial connection the full
thought of the race should come. To the lonely youth upon the New
Zealand sheep farm, to the young Hindu, to the trapper under a Labrador
tilt, to the half-breed assistant at a Burmese oil-well, to the
self-educating Scottish miner or the Egyptian clerk, the Empire and the
English language should exist, visibly and certainly, as the media by
which his spirit escapes from his immediate surroundings and all the
urgencies of every day, into a limitless fellowship of thought and
beauty.

Now I am not writing this in any vague rhetorical way; I mean
specifically that our Empire has to become the medium of knowledge and
thought to every intelligent person in it, or that it is bound to go to
pieces. It has no economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity.
Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language and purpose and
outlook. If it is not held together by thought and spirit, it cannot be
held together. No other cement exists that can hold it together
indefinitely.

Not only English literature, but all other literatures well translated
into English, and all science and all philosophy, have to be brought
within the reach of everyone capable of availing himself of such
reading. And this must be done, not by private enterprise or for gain,
but as an Imperial function. Wherever the Empire extends there its
presence must signify all that breadth of thought and outlook no
localised life can supply.

Only so is it possible to establish and maintain the wide
understandings, the common sympathy necessary to our continued
association. The Empire, mediately or immediately, must become the
universal educator, news-agent, book-distributor, civiliser-general, and
vehicle of imaginative inspiration for its peoples, or else it must
submit to the gravitation of its various part