I am at one with you in hating “hush up” as I do all other forms of lying; but I venture to submit that the compromise of 1871 was not a “hush up.”  If I had taken it to be such, I should have refused to have anything to do with it....

There has never been the slightest ambiguity about my position in the matter; in fact, if you will turn to one paper on the School Board written by me before my election in 1870, I think you will find that I anticipated the pith of the present discussion.

The persons who agreed to the compromise did exactly what all sincere men who agree to compromise do.  For the sake of the enormous advantage of giving the rudiments of a decent education to several generations of the people, they accepted what was practically an armistice in respect of certain matters about which the contending parties were absolutely irreconcilable.

To return to his activity on the School Board.  His vigorous work as chairman of the committee appointed to frame an educational scheme was marked by great breadth of view.  He desired the elementary schools to be linked at the one end with infant schools; at the other with continuation schools and some scheme for technical education.  A perfect scheme would provide what he first called a ladder from the gutter to the university, whereby children of exceptional capacity might reach the places for which nature had fitted them.  His sense of fitness would have welcomed even more warmly some system whereby the incompetent born into the higher strata of the social organism should be automatically graded down to the positions more appropriate to their wits and character.  But this is an ideal only possible in Plato’s State, where philosophers are kings and possess superhuman power of intuition.

Sincerity is sometimes impracticable.  But here sincerity was combined with common-sense practicality, and even an opponent like Lord Shaftesbury was impelled to write in his journal:—­“Professor Huxley has this definition of morality and religion:  ’Teach a child what is wise:  that is morality.  Teach him what is wise and beautiful:  that is religion!’ Let no one henceforth despair of making things clear and of giving explanations!”

He did not, however, disguise his fundamental opposition to Ultramontanism, that intellectual and social imperium in imperio, with its basic hostility to the free scientific spirit.  This he had already expressed in his “Scientific Education” (Coll.  Ess., iii, 111), an address of 1869, and he repeated it towards the end of his service on the School Board when opposing a bye-law that the Board should pay over direct to denominational schools the fees for poor children—­to schools, that is, outside the Board’s control.  He opposed it partly because it would assuredly lead to repeated contests on the Board; partly because it would give a handle to that party whose system, as set forth in the syllabus, of securing complete possession of the minds of their flock, was destructive of all that was highest in the nature of mankind and inconsistent with intellectual and political liberty.