For thirty-five years then he served his country as an Inspector of Elementary Schools, and the experience which he thus gained, the interest which was thus awoke in him, suggested to him some large and far-reaching views about our entire system of National Education.  It is no disparagement to a highly-cultivated and laborious staff of public servants to say that he was the greatest Inspector of Schools that we have ever possessed.  It is true that he was not, as the manner of some is, omnidoct and omnidocent.  His incapacity to examine little girls in needlework he frankly confessed; and his incapacity to examine them in music, if unconfessed, was not less real.  “I assure you,” he said to the Westminster Teachers, “I am not at all a harsh judge of myself; but I know perfectly well that there have been much better inspectors than I.”  Once, when a flood of compliments threatened to overwhelm him, he waved it off with the frank admission—­“Nobody can say I am a punctual Inspector.”  Why then do we call him the greatest Inspector that we ever had?  Because he had that most precious of all combinations—­a genius and a heart.  Trying to account for what he could not ignore—­his immense popularity with the masters and mistresses of the schools which he inspected—­he attributed part of it to the fact that he was Dr. Arnold’s son, part to the fact that he was “more or less known to the public as an author”; but, of personal qualifications for his office, he enumerated two only, and both eminently characteristic:  “One is that, having a serious sense of the nature and function of criticism, I from the first sought to see the schools as they really were; thus it was felt that I was fair, and that the teachers had not to apprehend from me crotchets, pedantries, humours, favouritism, and prejudices.”  The other was that he had learnt to sympathize with the teachers.  “I met daily in the schools men and women discharging duties akin to mine, duties as irksome as mine, duties less well paid than mine; and I asked myself:  Are they on roses?  Gradually it grew into a habit with me to put myself into their places, to try and enter into their feelings, to represent to myself their life.”

It belongs to the very nature of an Inspector’s work that it escapes public notice.  Very few are the people who care to inform themselves about the studies, the discipline, the intellectual and moral atmosphere of Elementary Schools, except in so far as those schools can be made battle-grounds for sectarian animosity.  And, if they are few now, they were still fewer during the thirty-five years of Arnold’s Inspectorship.  A conspicuous service was rendered both to the cause of Education and to Arnold’s memory when the late Lord Sandford rescued from the entombing blue-books his friend’s nineteen General Reports to the Education Department on Elementary Schools.  In those Reports we read his deliberate judgment on the merits, defects, needs, possibilities and ideals of elementary schools; and this not merely as regards the choice of subjects taught, but as regards cleanliness, healthiness, good order, good manners, relations between teachers and pupils, selection of models in prose and verse, and the literary as contrasted with the polemical use of the Bible.