In any case, whether we win through to real peace and real security, or whether we are thrown back on an armed peace and the duty of unbroken vigilance, we shall be dependent for our future on the children who are now learning in the schools or playing in the streets.  It is a good dependence.  The children of to-day are better than the children whom I knew when I was a child.  I think they have more intelligence and sympathy; they certainly have more public spirit.  We cannot do too much for them.  The most that we can do is nothing to what they are going to do for us, for their own nation and people.  I am not concerned to discuss the education problem.  Formal education, carried on chiefly by means of books, is a very small part of the making of a man or a woman.  But I am interested to know what the children are thinking.  You cannot fathom a child’s thoughts, but we know who are their best teachers, and what lessons have been stamped indelibly on their minds.  Their teachers, whom they never saw, and whose lessons they will never forget, lie in graves in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Syria and Mesopotamia, or unburied at the bottom of the sea.  The runner falls, but the torch is carried forward.  This is what Julian Grenfell, who gave his mind and his life to the War, has said in his splendid poem called Into Battle: 

     And life is colour and warmth and light,
     And a striving evermore for these;
     And he is dead who will not fight,
     And who dies fighting hath increase.

Those who died fighting will have such increase that a whole new generation, better even than the old, will be ready, no long time hence, to uphold and extend and decorate the Commonwealth of nations which their fathers and brothers saved from ruin.

One thing I have never heard discussed, but it is the clearest gain of all, and already it may be called a certain gain.  After the War the English language will have such a position as it has never had before.  It will be established in world-wide security.  Even before the War, it may be truly said, our language was in no danger from the competition of the German language.  The Germans have never had much success in the attempt to get their language adopted by other peoples.  Not all the military laws of Prussia can drive out French from the hearts and homes of the people of Alsace.  In the ports of the near and far East you will hear English spoken—­pidgin English, as it is called, that is to say, a selection of English words suited for the business of daily life.  But you may roam the world over, and you will hear no pidgin German.  Before the War many Germans learned English, while very few English-speaking people learned German.  In other matters we disagreed, but we both knew which way the wind was blowing.  It may be said, and said truly, that our well-known laziness was one cause of our failing or neglecting to learn German.  But it was not the only cause;