Note 14 — Chapter I · NATURE’S INSURGENT SON

The practical steps which would correspond to the views enunciated in this discourse are two. First, the formation of an educational association to establish one or more schools and colleges in which nature-knowledge and training in nature-searching should be the chief matters to which attention would be given, whilst reasonable methods would also be employed for implanting in the minds of the students a love and understanding of literature and other forms or art. Those who desired such an education for their children would support these schools and colleges, just as in the days of Anglican exclusiveness the Nonconformists and Roman Catholics supported independent educational institutions. The second practical step would be the formation of a political union which would make due respect to efficiency, that is to say, to a knowledge of Nature, a test question in all political contests. No candidate for Parliament would receive the votes of the union unless he were either himself educated in a knowledge of Nature or promised his support exclusively to ministers who would insist on the utilization of nature-knowledge in the administration of the great departments of State, and would take active measures of a financial character to develop with far greater rapidity and certainty than is at present the case, that inquiry into and control of Nature which is the indispensable factor in human welfare and progress. Such a programme will, I hope, at no distant date obtain the support of a sufficient number of parliamentary voters to raise political questions of a more genuine and interesting character than those which many find so tedious at the present moment.