institutions as King’s College and University College were to be co-ordinated to the existing Universities; and the Universities were to establish “faculties” in great centres of population, supply professors and lecturers, and then examine and confer degrees.  Then the country should be mapped out into eight or ten districts, and each of these districts should have a Provincial School-Board, which should “represent the State in the country,” keep the Minister informed of local requirements, and be the organ of communication between him and the schools in its jurisdiction.  The exact amount of interference, inspection, and control which the Minister, the Council, and the Boards should exercise should vary in accordance with the grade of the schools:  it should be greater in the elementary schools, less in the higher.  But, in their degree, all, from Eton downwards, were to be subject to it.  Then came the most revolutionary part of the whole scheme.  Mr. Creakle and his congeners were to be abolished.  They were not to be put to a violent death, but they were to be starved out.  The whole face of the country is studded with small grammar-schools or foundation-schools, like knots in a network; and these schools, enlarged and reformed, were to be the ordinary training-places of the Middle Class.  Where they did not exist, similar schools were to be created by the State—­“Royal or Public Schools”—­and these, like all the rest, were to be subject to the Minister and to the Provincial Boards.  Arnold contended that ancient schools so revived, and modern schools so constituted, would have a dignity and a status such as no private school could attain, and would be free from the pretentiousness and charlatanism which he regarded as the bane of private education.  The inspection and control of these Public Schools would be in the hands of competent officers of the State, whereas the private school is appraised only by the vulgar and uneducated class that feeds it.

And so, descending from the Universities through Public Schools of two grades, we touch the foundation of the whole edifice—­the Elementary Schools.  On this all-important topic, he wrote in 1868:  “About popular education I have here but a very few words to say.  People are at last beginning to see in what condition this really is amongst us.  Obligatory instruction is talked of.  But what is the capital difficulty in the way of obligatory instruction, or indeed any national system of instruction, in this country?  It is this:  that the moment the working class of this country have this question of instruction brought home to them, their self-respect will make them demand, like the working classes of the Continent, Public Schools, and not schools which the clergyman, or the squire, or the mill-owner calls “my school.”  And again:  “The object should be to draw the existing Elementary Schools from their present private management, and to reconstitute them on a municipal basis.”