It is unnecessary to describe the Fabian plan, because it is substantially the system of administration, established by the Act of 1902, under which present-day education is organised.  The main difference is that we presented a revolutionary proposal in an extremely moderate form and Mr. Arthur Balfour found himself able to carry out our principles more thoroughly than we thought practically possible.  Our tract advocated the abolition of all School Boards, but anticipated, incorrectly, that those of the twenty or thirty largest cities would be too strong to be destroyed:  and whilst insisting that the public must find all the money required to keep the voluntary schools in full efficiency, we only proposed that this should take the form of a large grant by County Councils and County Boroughs, whilst Mr. Balfour was able to make the Councils shoulder the cost.

How far the draughtsmen of the Bill were influenced by the Fabian scheme cannot here be estimated, but the authorities at Whitehall were so anxious to see it that they were supplied with proofs before publication; and the tract when published was greedily devoured by perplexed M.P.’s.

It must be recollected that the whole complex machinery of educational administration was in the melting-pot, and nobody knew what was to come out of it.  It had been assumed by nearly everybody that education was a department of local government which demanded for its management a special class of representatives.  The Liberal Party was attached to School Boards, because their creation had been one of the great party victories of Mr. Gladstone’s greatest Government, because they embodied a triumph over the Church and the virtual establishment of nonconformity in control of half the elementary schools of the country.  Socialists and the vague labour section took the same view partly because they believed theoretically in direct election for all purposes and partly because the cumulative vote, intended to secure representation to minorities, gave them better chances of success at the polls than they then had in any other local election.  The Board schools, with ample funds derived from the rates, were far better than the so-called voluntary schools; but more than half the children of the nation were educated in these schools, under-staffed, ill-equipped, and on the average in all respects inefficient.  Every year that passed turned out thus its quota of poorly educated children.  Something had to be done at once to provide more money for these inferior schools.  It might be better that they should be abolished and State schools everywhere supplied, but this was a counsel of perfection, and there was no time to wait for it.  Then again the distinction between elementary education for the poor, managed by School Boards and by the voluntary school authorities, and other education controlled and subsidised by Town and County Councils, was disastrous, the more so since a recent legal decision (the Cockerton case) had restricted the limits of School Board education more narrowly than ever.