There never was before, there never may be again, so wonderful an opportunity for a cleaning-up and sweeping-out of those two places, and for a profitable new start in British education.

The cessation of Oxford and Cambridge does not give the full measure of the present occasion.  All the other British universities are in a like case.  And the schools which feed them have been practically swept clean of their senior boys.  And not a tithe of any of this war class of schoolboys will ever go to the universities now, not a tithe of the war class of undergraduates will ever return.  Between the new education and the old there will be a break of two school generations.  For the next thirty or forty years an exceptional class of men will play a leading part in British affairs, men who will have learnt more from reality and less from lectures than either the generations that preceded or the generations that will follow them.  The subalterns of the great war will form a distinct generation and mark an epoch.  Their experiences of need, their sense of deficiencies, will certainly play a large part in the reconstitution of British education. The stamp of the old system will not be on them.

Now is the time to ask what sort of training should a university give to produce the ruling, directing, and leading men which it exists to produce?  Upon that Great Britain will need to make up its mind speedily.  It is not a matter for to-morrow or the day after; it is necessary to decide now what it is the Britain that is coming will need and want, and to set to work revising the admission and degree requirements, and reconstructing all those systems of public examinations for the public services that necessarily dominate school and university teaching, before the universities and schools reassemble.  If the rotten old things once get together again, the rotten old things will have a new lease of life.  This and no other is the hour for educational reconstruction.  And it is in the decisions and readjustments of schools and lectures and courses, far more than anywhere else, that the real future of Great Britain will be decided.  Equally true is this of all the belligerent countries.  Much of the future has a kind of mechanical inevitableness, but here far more than anywhere else, can a few resolute and capable men mould the spirit and determine the quality of the Europe to come.

Now surely the chief things that are needed in the education of a ruling class are these—­first, the selection and development of Character, then the selection and development of Capacity, and, thirdly, the imparting of Knowledge upon broad and comprehensive lines, and the power of rapidly taking up and using such detailed knowledge as may be needed for special occasions.  It is upon the first count that the British schools and universities have been most open to criticism.  We have found the British university-trained class under the fiery tests of this war an evasive, temporising class of people, individualistic, ungenerous, and unable either to produce or obey vigorous leadership.  On the whole, it is a matter for congratulation, it says wonderful things for the inherent natural qualities of the English-speaking peoples, that things have proved no worse than they are, considering the nature of the higher education under which they have suffered.