And it is to the need and nature of that Conference that I would devote myself.  I do not mean by the word Conference any gathering of dull and formal and inattentive people in this dusty hall or that, with a jaded audience and intermittently active reporters, such as this word may conjure up to some imaginations.  I mean an earnest direction of attention in all parts of the country to this necessity for a studied and elaborated project of conciliation and social co-operation We cannot afford to leave such things to specialised politicians and self-appointed, self-seeking “experts” any longer.  A modern community has to think out its problems as a whole and co-operate as a whole in their solution.  We have to bring all our national life into this discussion of the National Plan before us, and not simply newspapers and periodicals and books, but pulpit and college and school have to bear their part in it.  And in that particular I would appeal to the schools, because there more than anywhere else is the permanent quickening of our national imagination to be achieved.

We want to have our young people filled with a new realisation that History is not over, that nothing is settled, and that the supreme dramatic phase in the story of England has still to come.  It was not in the Norman Conquest, not in the flight of King James II, nor the overthrow of Napoleon; it is here and now.  It falls to them to be actors not in a reminiscent pageant but a living conflict, and the sooner they are prepared to take their part in that the better our Empire will acquit itself.  How absurd is the preoccupation of our schools and colleges with the little provincialisms of our past history before A.D. 1800!  “No current politics,” whispers the schoolmaster, “no religion—­except the coldest formalities Some parent might object.”  And he pours into our country every year a fresh supply of gentlemanly cricketing youths, gapingly unprepared—­unless they have picked up a broad generalisation or so from some surreptitious Socialist pamphlet—­for the immense issues they must control, and that are altogether uncontrollable if they fail to control them.  The universities do scarcely more for our young men.  All this has to be altered, and altered vigorously and soon, if our country is to accomplish its destinies.  Our schools and colleges exist for no other purpose than to give our youths a vision of the world and of their duties and possibilities in the world.  We can no longer afford to have them the last preserves of an elderly orthodoxy and the last repository of a decaying gift of superseded tongues.  They are needed too urgently to make our leaders leader-like and to sustain the active understandings of the race.