One such Commission has dealt with adult education. No more forcible and eloquent statement of the needs of the coming new era has ever been published, and I reproduce for you the closing paragraphs of one of the reports. This report has been recently presented to the Imperial Parliament. It reads:

"For no one can doubt that we are at a turning-point in our national history. A new era has come upon us. We cannot stand still. We cannot return to the old ways, the old abuses, the old stupidities. As with our international relations, so with the relations of classes and individuals inside our own nation, if they do not henceforth get better they must needs get worse, and that means moving towards an abyss. It is in our power to make the new era one of such progress as to repay us even for the immeasurable cost, the price in lives lost, in manhood crippled, and in homes desolated.

"Only by rising to the height of our enlarged vision of social duty can we do justice to the spirit generated in our people by the long effort of common aspiration and common suffering. To allow this spirit to die away unused would be a waste compared to which the material waste of the war would be a little thing; it would be a national sin, unpardonable in the eyes of our posterity. We stand at the bar of history for judgment, and we shall be judged by the use we make of this unique opportunity. It is unique in many ways, most of all in the fact that the public not only has its conscience aroused and its heart stirred, but also has its mind open and receptive to new ideas to an unprecedented degree.

"It is not the lack of goodwill that is to be feared. But goodwill without mental effort, without intelligent provision, is worse than ineffectual: it is a moral opiate. The real lack in our national history has been the lack of bold and clear thinking. We have been well-meaning, we have had good principles; where we have failed is in the courage and the foresight to carry out our principles into corporate life.

"This corporate life itself has only been made visible and real to us (as on a fiery background) by the glow and illumination of the war. We have been made conscious that we are heirs to a majestic inheritance, and that we have corresponding obligations We have awakened to the splendid qualities that were latent in our people, the rank and file of the common people who before this war were often adjudged to be decadent, to have lost their patriotism, their religious faith, and their response to leadership; we were even told they were physically degenerate. Now we see what potentialities lie in this people, and what a charge lies upon us to give to these powers free play. There is stirring through the whole country a sense of the duty we owe to our children and to our grandchildren to save them not only from the repetition