Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/16

 authority, and in the ear of Demos a fresh cry rings, fresh and new as from the lips of Morning: "What is Man? And what can you make of him?"

What can you make of him, toiler and bearer of burdens, you the unlearned, who have been called the last? It is an old question, but it has to be answered in a new fashion. Here tradition will not serve. To follow the path of mere tradition now would be, for the masses, to wipe out all the glory of their own advent. Is there anything in their experience which can supply them with a new answer to this old question, and which can also give them faith and courage to work for the realization of a new ideal? If not, then their new political power itself will in the end only prove a snare to them. They will be baffled by the same forces which in the past have proved too great for them. The spell which kept them half-conscious bearers of burdens, and which threatens still to keep them mere parts of a great machine driven by a power that ignores them, will still work.

But the working classes and their representatives may have a new word to speak on education. In any case, their experience furnishes ample materials for such a new message. Not forty years have passed