In my capacity of devil’s advocate pleading against national over-confidence, I might go on to the quality of our social and political movements.  One hears nowadays a vast amount of chatter about efficiency—­that magic word—­and social organisation, and there is no doubt a huge expenditure of energy upon these things and a widespread desire to rush about and make showy and startling changes.  But it does not follow that this involves progress if the enterprise itself is dully conceived and most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived.  In the absence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may set up as an “expert,” organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand.  The “expert” quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs multiply in darkness and heat.

I find the same doubts of our quality assail me when I turn to the supreme business of education.  It is true we all seem alive nowadays to the need of education, are all prepared for more expenditure upon it and more, but it does not follow necessarily in a period of stagnating imagination that we shall get what we pay for.  The other day I discovered my little boy doing a subtraction sum, and I found he was doing it in a slower, clumsier, less businesslike way than the one I was taught in an old-fashioned “Commercial Academy” thirty odd years ago.  The educational “expert,” it seems, has been at work substituting a bad method for a good one in our schools because it is easier of exposition.  The educational “expert,” in the lack of a lively public intelligence, develops all the vices of the second-rate energetic, and he is, I am only too disposed to believe, making a terrible mess of a great deal of our science teaching and of the teaching of mathematics and English....

I have written enough to make clear the quality of my doubts.  I think the English mind cuts at life with a dulled edge, and that its energy may be worse than its somnolence.  I think it undervalues gifts and fine achievement, and overvalues the commonplace virtues of mediocre men.  One of the greatest Liberal statesmen in the time of Queen Victoria never held office because he was associated with a divorce case a quarter of a century ago.  For him to have taken office would have been regarded as a scandal.  But it is not regarded as a scandal that our Government includes men of no more ability than any average assistant behind a grocer’s counter.  These are your gods, O England!—­and with every desire to be optimistic I find it hard under the circumstances to anticipate that the New Epoch is likely to be a blindingly brilliant time for our Empire and our race.

WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE?

What will hold such an Empire as the British together, this great, laxly scattered, sea-linked association of ancient states and new-formed countries, Oriental nations, and continental colonies?  What will enable it to resist the endless internal strains, the inevitable external pressures and attacks to which it must be subjected This is the primary question for British Imperialism; everything else is secondary or subordinated to that.