an event of this sort produces the most various reactions in people, and i recall with a distressful amusement two unknown persons who accosted me as i went out from university college to find a taxi to take me to mrs. sanderson. one was a young woman who came up to me and said: 'don't be grieved for your friend, mr. wells. it was a splendid thing to die like that in the midst of life, after giving his message.'

i did not accept these congratulations and i made no reply to her. i was thinking that a little acute observation, a little more consideration on my part, a finer sense of the labour i was putting upon my friend, might have averted his death altogether. and i was by no means convinced that his message was delivered, that it had reached the people i had hoped it would reach and awaken. i had counted on much more from sanderson. this death seemed to me and still seems far more like frustration than release.

then presently as i gesticulated for a cab near gower street station, i found a pale-faced, earnest-looking man beside me asking for a moment's speech. 'mr. wells,' he said, 'does not this[pg 174] sudden event give you new views of immortality, new lights upon spiritual realities?'

i stared at a sort of greedy excitement in his face. 'none whatever!' i said at last and got into my taxi.

i must confess that to this day i can find in sanderson's death nothing but irreparable loss. he left much of his work in a state so incomplete that i cannot see how his successors can carry it on. in matters educational he was before all things a practical artist, and education is altogether too much the prey of theories. he filled me—a mere writer, with envious admiration when i saw how he could control and shape things to his will, how he could experiment and learn and how he could use his boys, his governors, his staff, to try out and shape his creative dreams.

he was a strong man and in a very profound and simple way a good man, and it was a very helpful thing to feel oneself his ally. but now that he is gone, now that all his later projects and intentions shrivel and fade and his great school recedes visibly towards the commonplace, i do not know where to turn to do an effective stroke for education. it is only schoolmasters and [pg 175]schoolmistresses and educational authorities and school governors and school promoters and university teachers who can really carry on the work that he began. in this book i have tried to set out as clearly as possible, and largely in his own words, his fundamental ideas of the supersession of competition by co-operation, of the return of schools to real service and of a house of vision, a temple of history and the future, as the brain and centre of community life. this present book is, as it were, a simplified diagram of the teachings less luminously and more fully set out in the official life.

one thing i shared with sanderson altogether, and that was our conviction that the present common life of men, at once dull and disorderly, competitive, uncreative, cruelly stupid and stupidly cruel, unless it is to be regarded merely as a necessary phase in the development of a nobler existence, is a thing not worth having, that it does not matter who drops dead or how soon we drop dead out of such a world. unless there is a more abundant life before mankind, this scheme of space and time is a bad joke beyond our understanding, a flare of vulgarity, an empty laugh,[pg 176] braying across the mysteries. but we two shared the belief that latent in men and perceptible in men is a greater mankind, great enough to make every effort to realise it fully worth while, and to make the whole business of living worth while.

and the way to that realisation lies, we both believed, through thought and through creative effort, through science and art and the school.