Nor can it be doubted that his policy was right. If he ...

Nor can it be doubted that his policy was right.

If he levelled down the best schools, he levelled up the worst, and so made sure that, when compulsion came in the seventies, those who were compelled to go to school would learn something when they got there, to write a email, to make out a note and hem a shirt. It was not much, but in the thirties it would have seemed a visionary ideal.

That the ideal had been so imperfectly realized, that the late Victorian democracy was not altogether unfit for its responsibilities, was in the main the work of one man, and, if history judged men less by the noise than by the difference they make, it is hard to think of any name in the Victorian age which deserves to stand above or even beside Kay-Shuttleworth's. In the early nineteenth century England had possessed in seven or eight hundred old grammar schools an apparatus for giving the middle classes an education as good as public opinion required for the class above and below, and by a disastrous miscalculation she let it run down.