ce of the country is studded with small
grammar-schools or foundation-schools, like knots in a network; and
these schools, enlarged and reformed, were to be the ordinary
training-places of the Middle Class. Where they did not exist, similar
schools were to be created by the State--"Royal or Public Schools"--and
these, like all the rest, were to be subject to the Minister and to the
Provincial Boards. Arnold contended that ancient schools so revived, and
modern schools so constituted, would have a dignity and a status such as
no private school could attain, and would be free from the
pretentiousness and charlatanism which he regarded as the bane of
private education. The inspection and control of these Public Schools
would be in the hands of competent officers of the State, whereas the
private school is appraised only by the vulgar and uneducated class that
feeds it.

And so, descending from the Universities through Public Schools of two
grades, we touch the foundation of the whole edifice--the Elementary
Schools. On this all-important topic, he wrote in 1868: "About popular
education I have here but a very few words to say. People are at last
beginning to see in what condition this really is amongst us. Obligatory
instruction is talked of. But what is the capital difficulty in the way
of obligatory instruction, or indeed any national system of instruction,
in this country? It is this: that the moment the working class of this
country have this question of instruction brought home to them, their
self-respect will make them demand, like the working classes of the
Continent, _Public_ Schools, and not schools which the clergyman, or the
squire, or the mill-owner calls "my school." And again: "The object
should be to draw the existing Elementary Schools from their present
private management, and to reconstitute them on a municipal basis."

That word which he italicized--_public_--is the key to his whole system.
The whole education of the country was to be Public. The Universities,
already "public" in the sense that they are not private ventures, were
to be made public in the sense that they were to be supervised and to
some extent regulated by the State. The Public Schools, traditionally
so-called, were to be made more really public by being brought under the
Minister and the School-Boards. The lesser foundation-schools were to be
made public by a redistribution of their revenues and a reconstruction
of their system; and ne