project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I
wanted to build up a new educational machine altogether for the
governing class out of a consolidated system of special public
service schools. I meant to get to work upon this whatever office I
was given in the new government. I could have begun my plan from
the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily as from the
Education Office. I am firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of
reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs
of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost
would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have
sought a way round this invincible obstacle. I do think it would be
quite practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole
system by creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific
boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for the public
service generally, and as they grew, opening them to the public
without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.
Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new
college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern
history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological
science, education and sociology.

We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut
the umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should
have set this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old
public schools and the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I
had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have found
others. I should have aimed at making a hard-trained, capable,
intellectually active, proud type of man. Everything else would
have been made subservient to that. I should have kept my grip on
the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I would have