And I should write below it that utterance of President Fisher, of England's Board of Education, made in the midst of the war, when the days were darkest:
"Education is the eternal debt which Maturity owes to Youth."
And beneath that I should put, I think, the lines of Gilbert Murray, whom I saw the same day, taken from the lips of Hecuba:
"God, to Thee I lift my praise, seeing the silent road That bringeth justice ere the end be trod To all that breathes and dies."
What should be written in detail below these captions, I should let a great international committee recommend--a committee with planetary consciousness which could let each people continue the excellence that has "grown habitual to its being," and yet include such instruction in the excellence of others as to abate the hatreds that now divide the men of the earth, even as they were divided by their misunderstandings in that early post-Noachian period when Eber, the son of Shelah, named his boy Peleg, "because in his day the earth was divided," and the children could no longer read the lessons upon Enoch's pillars.
I travelled the entire length of this line during the war, from the edge of the desert on the farther edge of which Enoch's pillars stood to the North Sea. From the Mount of Olives I heard and saw the beginnings of the battle of Armageddon--not an allegorical battle, but the literal battle, for when I made my way to Headquarters down on the plain of Sharon, General Allenby, coming out of his map-room, said: "I have just had word that my cavalry are at Armageddon. The battle of Armageddon is on." And a few nights after I walked through the broken entanglements of wire across that plain, past the Mount, as the dawn came, where our Lord is said by some to have delivered what we call the Sermon on the Mount, on to Nazareth, the little city which a Denver paper referred to familiarly as "Christ's home town." And I thought the thousand years of peace referred to in the Book of Revelation had come.
But I have since travelled over a great part of that way--the long, long way, let us not forget, by which we have come out of captivity--and I found that, while the barbed-wire entanglements have been cleared from most of the fields and the trenches had been filled, the entanglements, suspicion and hate, were still keeping nations apart, even without guns and bombs and poisonous gas.