At all events, I refuse to believe that we cannot do a good deal more with education as a solvent of our troubles than we have done hitherto. The main and obvious difficulty—one might say the only real difficulty—in education, as in all the affairs of life, is to find the men; and to find the men we can only make use of machinery which is acceptable to a democratic age. Yes, we cannot now go outside Democracy, and that is something to be profoundly grateful for. The only trouble with Democracy is that it is slow and inarticulate. And I do not feel that the democratic principle—in which I believe as much as any man—will ever do itself justice until it discovers some quicker way than it yet has of shaping out of itself its spiritual essence, some swifter way of extracting from itself and utilizing for its own service the highest aspiration and finest feeling within it. It has succeeded on the whole fairly well in discovering and making use of its best business and administrative minds; but so far it has regarded spirituality as completely outside its province and deliberately left it to religious bodies that have no longer, nationally speaking, a real hold on us, and are professedly autocratic. In fact, Democracy at present—and not only here but in America—offers the spectacle of a man running down a road followed at a more and more respectful distance by his own soul.
Can our education any longer be safely treated in this casual way, be safely left to Churches from whose hand it has too far slipped; be safely left as to the Classes to chance and to vested interests; as to the Masses to mere business management?
Should we not rather trust it coherently and as a whole to the finest spirits and broadest minds in the country; to spirits that can be relied on to hold, and to minds that can be relied on to apply, a really high ideal; relied on, too, _to select and train the best men available for the propagation of that Ideal_? If by some democratic process we could sift out these minds from among us, and endow them with wholesale powers of selection, appointment, and training of teachers, we should have established a sort of endless band on which might travel a perpetual vitalizing current of the best feeling within us. To find these finest spirits and broadest minds we might conceivably use the existing representative machinery of Parliament, or some reformed representative system; or we might institute a special straining and sifting process, by means of plebiscite within plebiscite, till we were reasonably sure of arriving at the men best fitted to be entrusted with a high, coherent plan of education. We have, then, to found and place under their guidance a great training college, wherein the higher leaders of education may be imbued with the new spirit, trained in the new standards, and pass out, as posts fall vacant, to the headship of schools and colleges. And if it be objected, as it certainly will, that this is to constitute a too rigid spiritual bureaucracy, the answer is two-fold: This is the plan on which you order all your political, your material life, without regarding it as in the least dangerous or undemocratic. And, secondly, you have at present exactly the same bureaucratic methods of appointment in education, only they are exercised in a hole-and-corner manner, quite incoherently, and _without any democratic check at all_.