“What is the war about?” “Are we fighting in a just cause?” Every one by now has asked himself this question, and most people have studied some at least of the evidence, and tried to satisfy themselves as to the answer.  The Foreign Office White Paper and numberless books and pamphlets have enlightened the public on many of the questions at issue.  Yet the fact remains that the necessity of this educative campaign involves a confession of failure—­or at least of grave neglect—­on the part of British democracy.  Under our democratic constitution the people of Great Britain have assumed the responsibility for the management of their own affairs.  One great department of those affairs, the most vital of all, they and their representatives have systematically neglected.  Deeply engaged and interested in domestic problems, they have left the control of their foreign relations in the hands of expert advisers.  And so it was with something like stupefaction that they discovered, one day in August, that they were called upon to honour the obligations contracted in their name.

There has been no desire to evade those obligations.  But there has been a very real desire to understand them, and also a fixed determination never again to allow such a lack of contact, on vital issues, between the mind of the people and the activities of their ministers.

But no mere changes in the machinery of democratic control can avail to save the people from the consequences of their own ignorance and neglect.  There is only one way in which we can achieve full Democracy in this country, and that is through Education.

In the sphere of domestic affairs, particularly in connection with social and industrial questions, the people have slowly realised this hard truth.  After a generation or more of attempts and failures and disillusionments many thousands of workpeople have learnt the lesson that power without knowledge is not power at all, and that knowledge, whether for public affairs or for any other purpose, cannot be gained without effort and discipline.  They have come to realise that Democracy needs, for its full working, not only schools in which to train its young, but also—­what no Democracy save those of the ancient world has ever possessed—­such facilities for the education for its adult citizens, engaged in the active work of the community, as will enable them to maintain unimpaired their intellectual freshness and vigour, and to face with wisdom and courage the problems for which, as citizens, they have assumed responsibility.  They have come to think of Education, not as a time of tutelage or training, but as a part of active life itself, woven of the same texture and concerned with the same issues, as being, in fact, the effort to understand the world in which they live.  But they have naturally tended to confine those issues within the limits of their own domestic interests and experience.  They are called upon now to widen their horizon, and to apply the democratic conception of education to the new problems which have arisen owing to the part which Great Britain is now playing in the affairs of Europe.