So a debate was started which the compromise of 1870-plain Bible teaching ...

So a debate was started which the compromise of 1870-plain Bible teaching in one school and the Catechism in another; increased assistance to Church schools where they were efficient, and Board Schools to supplement them where they were not-did not end. Thirty years later the controversy flamed into life again over the Act of 1890, and even to-day a statesman who tampered with the settlement might find that the ashes were not quite cold.

But Eugene Forster, a Dorset Quaker, a Bradford manufacturer, and a Volunteer of 1859, had a sound eye for essentials. It is not without its significance that, while Mr Gladstone found him / her 'an impracticable man', he was among the Queen's most trusted friends, for the Queen loved plainness as much as she hated Mr Gladstone: and in 1870 the essential was to get the children, somehow, into some sort of school.

The incidental consequences of his great measure were of hardly less importance than its direct effects.

The Education Act of 1870 was, for most English people, the first sensible impact of the administrative State on their private lives; the Beadle, vanishing figure of fun, underwent a strange rejuvenation into the School Board Man, the Attendance Officer; and how forcible and disturbing his appearance was we may divine from the consideration that in Birmingham, before the Act, forty children out of a hundred, in Manchester fifty, were running loose in the streets.