THE LARGER SYNTHESIS
apparent that there is no hope of a fully efficient and well-equipped official army under parliamentary government, and with that realisation there will naturally appear a disposition to seek some way to military efficiency, as far as is legally possible, outside War Office control. Already recruiting is falling off, it will probably fall off more and more as the patriotic emotions evoked by the Boer War fade away, and no trivial addition to pay or privilege will restore it. Elementary education has at last raised the intelligence of the British lower classes to a point when the prospect of fighting in distant lands under unsuitably educated British officers of means and gentility with a defective War Office equipment and inferior weapons has lost much of its romantic glamour. But an unofficial body that set itself to the establishment of a school of military science, to the sane organisation and criticism of military experiments in tactics and equipment, and to the raising for experimental purposes of volunteer companies and battalions, would find no lack of men. . . . What an unofficial syndicate of capable persons of the new sort may do in these matters has been shown in the case of the Turbinia, the germ of a complete revolution in naval construction.
Such attempts at unofficial soldiering would be entirely in the spirit in which I believe the New Republic will emerge, but it is in another line of activity that the growing new consciousness will presently be much more distinctly apparent. It is increasingly evident that to organise and control public education is beyond the power of a demo-
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