170 MY AMERICAN FRIENDS

real heart of America, and I have always come
away with the feeling that if there is any country
in the world where the attempt to set up an
educational State on the lines dreamed of by
Plato might be made with some promise of
success, America is assuredly the land for the
experiment. To the Englishman, accustomed to
educational conferences at home, the experience
is a somewhat strange one. At first he may have
some difficulty in recognizing that education is
what the conference is conferring about. There
is something in the atmosphere that will remind
him of a religious revival, and next to nothing
that he would expect in an assemblage of
pedagogues. He will soon discover that what
these eager men and women have at heart is
nothing less than the future of their country,
which they are all intent on building up into
some sort of Kingdom of God, vaguely conceived,
perhaps, and yet quite clearly a Kingdom of the
Spirit, Here, at last, American " uplift," so
tedious and empty in other connexions, seems
to have acquired a real purpose and meaning.
The experience may be commended to those
who know America only as a country " devoted to
material ends."

It must be said of American education, more
emphatically perhaps than of any other topic
dealt with in this book, that no summary state-
ment can do justice to the multiplicity and variety
of its activities* I have tried to avoid such state-