teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if

transitory zeal and success.

I do notremember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic

time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married

when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and Isaw

only the last decadent phase of his educational career.

The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the

world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness

andgenerosity. Part of its substance and staff andspirit survive,

more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.

The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how

many of the clumsy andlimited 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 stillremember 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

toremember 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,

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