Education and Free Speech.

(We have taken the liberty of prefixing to this letter from the Rhodes Scholar for 1920 a few sentences from a little book by Mr. A. Glutton Brock, well known as one of the most thoughtful and clear sighted of modern English writers on aesthetics and education; so far as we know he has yet to be accused of disloyalty, by the British Minister of Education or any body else.—Editor "Spike.")

"Therefore, one chief aim of education should be to insist that truth is always desirable for its own sake, and no matter what its consequences may seem to be. It should encourage the spiritual desire for truth no less than the spiritual desire for goodness. It should insist that the function of the intellect is to discover truth, not to discover reasons for doing what we want to do. And it should therefore never discourage in the Learner any desire for truth, however inconvenient it may be. There is, no doubt, sometimes danger in the truth; but there is far more danger in the notion that truth does not matter. ... It is the natural instinct of the spirit, in its desire for truth, to rebel against rules when they are blindly imposed, and this rebellion, however much of a nuisance it may be, is necessary to the healthy life of any society. It is just because there is not enough of it in Germany at present (1916), because her young have been taught to believe what is supposed to be for the good of the nation, because they have not revolted against this teaching but have taken the good of the nation for an absolute good, that the Germans have committed more crimes in their docility than any nation has ever committed out of sheer lawlessness."—A. Clutton Brock, "The Ultimate Belief."