Energy and Common Sense in Education and Empire

MR. FENNELL, the President of the Club, introduced the speaker, who addressed the meeting as follows: I wish to say a few words about energy and common sense in education and empire, and I think if we look through many of the crises of British history we shall find that those two qualities have been conspicuous in the British people. I feel that I speak with great deference here--my friend on my right will probably tell me that I am incorrect in some of my statements--I think that when Magna Charta was signed, common sense and energy were the conspicuous qualities of the people then. And if we come down to the troublous times of the 17th century, those two qualities were conspicuous again. I do not know what Wolfe's men would have been without the energy and common sense that were shown in 1759. It was the lack of them that caused trouble a few years later on the other side of the St. Lawrence. And when we look through the 19th century history we find those two qualities constantly cropping up. I need hardly refer you to the Great War in this century but I will just in passing refer to that astonishing event in England known as the Great Strike, when the common sense and energy of the English people were the marvel of the whole of the civilized world. (Applause.)

We are told sometimes that we are a weird people, we have not got the brilliance or the culture of the French; we are men of action and we are dull. I am not sure that we need be altogether ashamed of dullness. There was a master in one of the English schools who had to send in his terminal reports to the Headmaster, on each boy in his form; and he wrote of one, "dull but steady; will

make a good parent." (Laughter.) If we look back at the history of education in the Old Country for 100 years, we shall see many things that will astonish us at the present day. There will be some Oxford men present here today, I have no doubt; nevertheless this story is true. A hundred years ago an undergraduate presented himself at Oxford for his degree. He had to translate a few sentences from Livy, he had to explain the fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid, and he obtained his Arts degree. He proceeded to a fellowship, he became Warden of his college, doctor of divinity, and it was he who shortly afterwards wrote this sentence: "Righteousness will not come to the earth again until the writing, printing and publishing of books is prohibited by law." (Laughter.) In those days the law of natural selection had hardly worked in connection with games. At Eton hoops and battledores and tops held their place along with cricket and football, and there were astonishing things going on in some of those great public schools. I do not think Dickens was exaggerating when he wrote his account of the famous school of my own county of Yorkshire. There were mutinies not unusual in some of the big schools. George III used often to ask the boys at Eton when he met them, "Have you had a rebellion lately? Eh? Eh?" And was disappointed if there had not been one of recent date. (Laughter.) At Winchester there was a mutiny, I think in 1816; there had been several at the end of the previous century; there was a mutiny that was put down by a company of soldiers with fixed bayonets. I think the best record that I know was in 1797 when the Head master of Rugby had ordered the boys to refund a tradesman where they had done damage to his property. Their reply was to blow up the door of the Headmaster's study, to burn his books, along with a number of the school desks. He called in the police, the Riot Act was read, the boys retired to the island there, and the island was after a day or two taken by assault by a company of soldiers. I believe that the last of those mutinies took place at Marlboro in 1801. Common sense and energy in education? I think the common sense was absent and the energy was misplaced in the story of those boys. I believe that the improvement in education in the Old Country was largely due to Butler of Shrewsbury, Arnold of Rugby, and Thring of Buckingham, and I would like to add the name of an unknown man, Ford of Bootham, York, my own school, because he was so responsible for influencing the principals of English schools in regard to the employment of leisure time in schools. And of course these men brought a change in the school by introducing humaner methods, remembering that the boys were after all gentlemen and that they needed something to minister to other activities besides those that were at work during school time. Greater allowance was made for natural history work, archaeological work, music, art, carpentry, and a number of other things. It was that kind of thing that helped to bring about the better feeling in the schools.

May I say a few words about two characteristics of English education at the present time in some of the schools, and I can speak with most authority of the school that I know, but of course I am not suggesting that the common sense and energy that I am speaking about is confined to one particular school. The two things I want to emphasize are citizenship in school life, and the employment of leisure hours, and of course with citizenship I think of the citizenship of the great empire as well as the citizenship of our towns and our own country. We are accustomed to allow one form or about 25 or 30 to have an intensive course on citizenship during three or four weeks of the year, and we are able to find time for that. During that time they may be studying the government of the country, they may be studying the imperial relations among the Dominions, they may be studying the housing question, or the coal problem. They will go and attend one of the meetings of the City Council, and not always hear anything profitable from the City Fathers. (Laughter.) They will study the work of the Guardians of the Public, and then during the whole of the year, two evenings a week some boys from a poor club in the east end of the city will come to the school for some of the upper boys to teach them gymnastics and swimming and cricket. We can get hold of the gang spirit, the common sense and energy, and the boys like to be able to help those who have not had the same opportunities. And then at the beginning of August twelve or fifteen of them, with one or two of the masters, will take fifty or sixty of these lads out to camp, and they will work and play together there for the time. The Duke of York has done the same kind of thing for the whole country, and year after year he invites two hundred of our public school boys to meet with three hundred factory lads and they live for a week or ten days under canvas together, helping with the running of the camp, and enjoying their games together. (Applause.) Last year he extended it to five hundred, and he asked an additional fifty of each, who had been there the year before, to join them as alumni for that particular camp. And you will forgive my pride if I mention that on the last day, when four hundred of them started out for the cross-country run, it was one of my two representatives who came in first from that race. (Applause.)

You may consider that I am trespassing from my path of common sense and energy, if I go back to talk about the Romans; but you cannot live in our City of York without being impressed at every step by the teaching of history. Only last summer we were celebrating the 1300th birthday of the great Minster of York, and three or four years ago we appointed a local committee, and I was very glad to serve on that committee, to dig with energy and common sense in some parts of the city where we knew there was Roman stuff to be found. The result is that we can now show you the Roman walls. What you see in York at the present day is of course the medieval wall, in many places on top of the Roman wall, but we have now been able to show five different walls. When the Roman first came to York in 71 A.D., he threw up a clay mound. We have dug down and found that clay mound, with some of his wooden palisades still adhering to the clay. No doubt Roman York was overrun by the barbarians, some of our ancestors, I suppose, a few years later; and the first stone wall was built, and we have found this stone wall, twenty feet below the surface of the ground, still with the coping stones in place for a distance of a few yards, and five feet from the top a two-foot sentry walk with the cobbles on for the sentries to walk along. The barbarians came again. York was overrun, and a third wall similar to the second has been found. We have also found a fourth, and then on the south side of the city, about the year 320, they built another wall with what we called the multangular tower, to guard against the incoming peoples on the river side of the city, again our ancestors, the English-speaking people, who were beginning to come up the river in those days.

We cannot have these things in the City of York without them influencing our education, consciously or unconsciously. A boy from my school three years ago was a field naturalist, a very keen geologist, and he was working one half-holiday fifteen miles away from York at the top of a quarry, hoping to find certain fossils that he was looking for. Instead of that he kept coming on bits of Roman pottery. He took home some pockets full and took some other boys out with him the next time. Within three or four weeks they had taken sackloads of Roman pottery from this place, some three inches in size, some eight or ten inches. Evidently it was not an accident that they were there. We thought it full of interest, and we applied to the Yorkshire Archaeological Society and to the landowner, the Earl of Carlyle, and we got leave to have this piece of the field marked off for our boys to go on with their excavations. They worked for months and found more and more of these pieces of pottery. The Roman pottery is so well known and so well catalogued that the experts will talk about any piece as A 15 and B 25 and so on, and they were able to piece a number of these fragments together so that we got nearly complete bowls. We thought it must have been somewhere there that the Romans made pottery, and the archaeologists had wondered for years where the pottery had been made. It looked as though there was some likely clay near, and we went on digging trenches and cross trenches, until last July we suddenly came down to three kilns where the pottery was actually made, and when we got down to the holes and flues they were still black with the charcoal that had been used in connection with those kilns.

I want to suggest that things of that kind are extraordinarily useful in education, and in the education of boys who are going out as colonists when their schooldays are over. They develop an initiative and a widening of horizon that they do not get from their ordinary school work. The energy and common sense of a boy can be used in ways of that kind.

Now I do not want to suggest that energy and common sense will make an empire, or are sufficient by themselves for imperial bonds. I think that with our energy and common sense we are all of us guardians of a great spiritual city. I am thinking of the world of books. I noticed the other day that an enterprising journal had asked some of our leading men in England, some of them literary men, what three books had most influenced them in connection with their life work. One replied "The Bible, Bernard Shaw, and Kipling." Another replied, "Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer." A third, somewhat of a highbrow, said, "I cannot distinguish any three books or 30 books or 300 books, that have specially influenced me." And Bernard, Shaw sent a postcard: "Who told you that any book had influenced me?" (Laughter.) But when we come to think of it, surely one of the greatest glories of the world is the English tongue, and Shakespeare, and Bunyan, and Swift, and Burns, I count amongst the greatest builders of empire who have lived at all. (Applause.) It matters not where we live; they are ours, they belong to us as much in one part of the world as in any other. We are to celebrate in England this year the 300th birthday of John Bunyan. I was looking through one of his immortal works the other day and I was struck with his energy and common sense. It is in the second part, which of course is not so good as the first part, he brings his pilgrims to one particular place, a valley where there are fat and fertile lands, and they wish to live there forever and enjoy the fruits of that beautiful country. They would like to be sure that that was the nearest way to the Father's House, so that they might no more be troubled by. the mountains and the hills. And then Bunyan says, "But the way is the way, and there is an end." And quite lately the author of the Fireside Saga has told the English-speaking people that he considers the great things in life are, to do our job well, to be brotherly, to seek health, and to ensue beauty. (Applause.) It is in thoughts of that kind, it seems to me, that we get one of the great imperial bonds. We cannot run an empire on energy and common sense alone. We must add to these qualities, knowledge, and particularly the results of scientific enquiries in the 19th and 20th centuries. 1 have thought that I was an unsatisfactory person to speak about empire; I know something about England and Scotland and Ireland, and I have had the privilege of being Gen. Smuts' guest in South Africa for a couple of years, and then four days in Canada. I was struck out there in South Africa with the determined way in which those men were going to make a success by using all the scientific knowledge that they could get hold of. It was a question of getting the fruit to the English markets in thoroughly good condition. They sent two of their best botanists over to England to examine the cold storage. For six or eight weeks in England they went each week to the boat when it landed on Monday morning, they saw the fruit on the boat, they saw the fruit in Covent Garden, and they reported to their government on any changes that ought to be made. I am sure that you in this country, with your great farms out in the west, are linking your work to the latest teaching of science. Knowledge we must add.

And then may I say one word about aspiration, aspiration for the best mental and spiritual gifts that we can attain to. I noticed that our Prime Minister in England last Saturday was calling upon the grim earnest of English youth, that is, the commonsense and energy of English youth, so to carry on the torch that the kingdoms of the world may in future be flooded with the light which we today can see only in our dreams. (Applause.) It is this kind of thing, aspiration, that must be added to the knowledge which comes as we go on in life.

It has been a very real pleasure to me to meet with members of the Canadian fellowship, who form one fellowship with the rest of us who are in the British Empire. We all start out on the same pilgrim's way, whether our home is Great Britain or Ireland or one of the great Dominions, and we start on that pilgrim way endowed with something of energy and common sense. As we go along that pilgrim way I am sure we add to our equipment, knowledge and aspiration. Each maintains his own individuality, but we are all united in aim and destination, and I believe that there are no stronger bonds in the world than bonds of kinship and aspiration to hold us together. (Applause.)

The thanks of the club were tendered to the speaker by Mr. W. D. Gregory.