ited governing bodies of my youth and early manhood
have given place now to more scientific and efficient machinery. When
I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strange
body called a Local Board--it was the Age of Boards--and I still
remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast-table over
the liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of a
Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; I
was already practically in politics before the London School Board was
absorbed by the spreading tentacles of the London County Council.

It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State to
remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within my
father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic people
were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of the sort.
When he was born, totally illiterate people who could neither read a
book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, were to be found
everywhere in England; and great masses of the population were getting
no instruction at all. Only a few schools flourished upon the patronage
of exceptional parents; all over the country the old endowed grammar
schools were to be found sinking and dwindling; many of them had
closed altogether. In the new great centres of population multitudes of
children were sweated in the factories, darkly ignorant and wretched
and the under-equipped and under-staffed National and British schools,
supported by voluntary contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an
ineffectual fight against this festering darkness. It was a condition
of affairs clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount
of indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were
possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian
will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the
commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian
enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.
I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they should
present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust of government
in the Victorian days was far too great, and the general intelligence
far too low, to permit the State to go about the new business it was
taking up in a businesslike way, to train teachers, build a