Spiced with sect, moreover, the School Board Elections were, particularly in London, ...

Spiced with sect, moreover, the School Board Elections were, particularly in London, as hot as a parliamentary contest.

To great numbers they gave a novel interest in local government: to a smaller circle, women as well as men, their first experience of administration. Nor, in any history of the Victorian age, should the school-builders be forgotten.

Those solid, large-windowed blocks, which still rise everywhere above the slate roofs of mean suburbs, meant for hundreds of thousands their first glimpse of a life of cleanliness and order, light and air. THE Educational controversy points the sagacity of Disraeli's observation in 1868 that religion would give the new electorate something to take sides on.

At no time since the seventeenth century had English society been so much preoccupied with problems of doctrine and Church order: at no time had the Establishment been so keenly assailed, or so angrily divided within itself.