§ 51

There is another group of indispensable servants to the State which was neglected, whose wages were less than the modern menial—the teachers. They are men whose education has been costly to their parents, who, in more cases than not, could ill afford the drain upon their resources. While miners, servants, even ignorant boys employed by publishers to wrap up books for distribution, were getting wages out of all proportion to the work they were doing, these “teachers” went quietly on with their useful labour, unnoticed and ill-paid. They formed a large class of intelligence and usefulness which constituted The New Poor!!! While the Government was conceding principle after principle to “strikers” and to a whole army of unreasonable discontent, the men who were working quietly for the cause of Education remained outside the sympathy of Government “Officials.” Under the New Commune a better and more just system is at work. They are treated, having been chosen and selected with care, as public servants, and as such they are paid; at least, they are now upon a scale of pay equal to the scullery maid of the past. “The profiteers,” often as ignorant as grasping, drove about the country in expensive motor cars, while the makers of England, from an intellectual point of view, were disregarded, even treated with contempt, because the balance at their bankers was small, probably nil, while that of Profiteers was such that their ladies were in diamonds and furs, and Borough Councillors thrived upon the Rates.

Now, let me remember and state what, in my dream, such men are doing, as public servants, for the previously unestimated value of education for that part of the community which is called Labour. In one of the most beautiful parts of Kent, once “the Garden” of England, under the slope of its backbone, on which is the Pilgrims Way, the road from London to Canterbury, is to be seen a straggling group of buildings, evidently erected gradually as accommodation demanded. The starting place was an old barn, one of those magnificent but simple buildings which were next to the church in importance and only second to it in noble proportions and dignified aspect. In a way, those old Tythe barns represented the people and their agriculture as faithfully as the churches their reverence and sacred traditions.