But if Leonard should be killed in the war--I think of it night and day--what I should like to do would be to drive to the Market Square of Wellingsford and wave a Union Jack round and round and fall down dead." I made some sort of sympathetic gesture.
"And I certainly should," she added.
"My dear friend," said I, "if I could move from this confounded chair, I would kiss your brave hands." And how many brave hands of English mothers, white and delicate, coarse and toil-worn, do not demand the wondering, heart-full homage of us all?
And hundreds of thousands of them don't know why we are fighting.
Hundreds of thousands of them have never read a newspaper in their lives.

I doubt whether they would understand one if they tried, I doubt whether all could read one in the literal sense of the word.

We have had--we have still--the most expensive and rottenest system of primary education in the world, the worst that squabbling sectarians can devise.

Arab children squatting round the courtyard of a Mosque and swaying backwards and forwards as they get by heart meaningless bits of the Koran, are not sent out into life more inadequately armed with elementary educational weapons than are English children.

Our state of education has nominally been systematised for forty-five years, and yet now in our hospitals we have splendid young fellows in their early twenties who can neither read nor write.