There are other schemes of education being planned and considered, and women are working with men on the education committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction.

The land question is all-important in reconstruction.  We have fixed a minimum price for wheat for five years, as well as minimum wages for the labourers on land, men and women, and we have schemes and land for the settlement of soldiers.  It is safe to predict that agriculture will be better looked after than it was before the war, and that we have learned a valuable lesson on food production, and the value of being more self-supporting.

There are people who talk airily and foolishly of “revolutions after the war”—­of great labour troubles, of exorbitant and impossible demands, of irreconcilable quarrels.  These people are themselves the creators and begettors of trouble, and mischievous in the highest degree.  They belong, though they are much less attractive, to the same category as the person who tells you that the moral regeneration of the world is coming from this great war.

The “revolutionists” have to learn that there is no need to have any such crises happen, that they can only happen if we are foolish beyond belief and conception—­for we have learned in this war how great and ample is the common meeting ground of all of us, how impossible it is for anyone to believe that we, who have fought together, suffered and lost together, while our men have died together, cannot find in consideration of claims enough common sense and wisdom to prevent any such disaster.

And one wonders where the people are going to be found who are going to be so unjust to the workers as to provide any reason for such dangers to be feared, for we know one thing in the war, that in the trenches, on the sea, behind the trenches and carrying on at home, the workers have done the greater part—­and they, in their turn, know all others have borne their share.  Out of such common knowledge and the consciousness that the practical work of democracy is to raise its people more and more, we shall have not revolution, but evolution of the best kind.  And the moral regeneration of the world will come if we reconstruct the one thing that matters most and that is fundamental to all—­ourselves—­and it will not come if we do not.  When one has said everything there is to be said of schemes and hopes of reconstruction—­about the schemes for better homes, and a great housing scheme is wisely one of the foundation schemes of our reconstruction, for which plans are now being prepared, about schemes for the care of children, about schemes for endowment of motherhood, which are exercising the minds of many of our women, you are back again to the individual.  When you think of education schemes, and schemes for teaching national service to the young, of work to teach care and thrift, you are back again to the problem of creating character.

When you go into the great world of industry and its problems, of care of the workers in health and sickness, of securing justice and full opportunities, of developing and wisely using our resources, again you return to the individual.