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.

It is never easy to think things out clearly and coldly. But it is hardest
of all in the crisis of a great war, when men's minds are blurred by
passionate emotions of sorrow, anxiety, and indignation. Hence a time of
war is the heyday of fallacies and delusions, of misleading hopes and
premature disillusionments: men tend to live in an unreal world of phrases
and catchwords. Yet never is it more necessary than at such a period, in
the old Greek phrase, "to follow the argument whithersoe'er it leads,"
to look facts squarely in the face, and, particularly, the great ugly