Extracts from Addresses 345
advantages that war has brought with it. It is in our purpose of recon-
struction that we should use to their full the enormous benefits that
have been conferred upon the world by this devastating war. If I have
said that I hoped the submarine will no longer have a purpose in time
of peace and should be destroyed, yet what of the airplane and the fact
that it has been developed so rapidly and so perfectly in time of war,
which I hope will react to our advantage in time of peace. In England
many things have been carried sanely and safely to a successful issue by
virtue of the war. As a single example I will only allude to the intro-
duction of the daylight saving bill, which otherwise would have been
discussed for years before being introduced. I will also remind you of
the fact that a thing which many English had very much at heart, woman
suffrage, was carried with no difficulty at all, owing widely to the im-
portant and fully recognized part which women have played in the serv-
ice of Great Britain and the Allied Nations during this war. I hope the
great and increasing development of shipbuilding which has taken place
will be made full use of for the purposes of peace. I feel quite sure that
in Great Britain at any rate, and I think in other parts of the world,
the increased attention that has been devoted to agriculture is going to
be the opening of a new chapter in the history of many parts of the world,
in returning to profitable and peaceable pursuits the use of large tracts
of country formerly ignored as being useless.
Now, if that is true of such things as these, it is still more true, I
think, of matters that concern education. In England, at any rate, one
of the effects of the war has been to stir up what was already beginning
to grow, but what has grown to an enormous extent since the war began,
an increasing interest in education. The whole country for the first time
really became interested in the educational laws. We have for the first
time as president of our Board of Education, a man who really under-
stands education and has been a practical teacher himself. As you know,
we have recently carried through in Great Britain during the war—it
seems a strange time to have done it—an educational act which intro-
duces compulsory education in the whole country, from the age of one
to the age of eighteen. This is a matter which at any other time in the
history of England might have required years and years of discussion,
at any rate many, many months of long discussion before it could have
possibly been accepted. It has gone through without difficulty, and I
believe that the interest in education which we have found so widely
sustained and so enormously powerful through all portions of the States
in which we have traveled, is going to spread through the whole world
to an extent previously undreamed of. It is the one thing that is required