great danger if education were not thrown open to all without restriction.  If it be urged that a man should be content with the state of life to which he is called, the obvious retort is, How do you know what is your state of life, unless you try what you are called to?  There is no more frightful] “sitting on the safety valve” [than in preventing men of ability from having the means of rising to the positions for which they, by their talents and industry, could qualify themselves.

Further, although the committee as a whole recommended that discretionary subjects should be extras, he wished them to be covered by the general payment, in which sense the report was amended.

This Education Committee (proceeds Dr. Gladstone) continued to sit, and on November 30 brought up a report in favour of the Prussian system of separate classrooms, to be tried in one school as an experiment.  This reads curiously now that it has become the system almost universally adopted in the London Board Schools.

In regard to examinations Huxley strongly supported the view that the teaching in all subjects, secular or sacred, should be periodically tested.

On December 13, Huxley raised the question whether the selection of books and apparatus should be referred to his Committee or to the School Management Committee, and on January 10 following, a small sub-committee for that object was formed.  Almost immediately after this he retired from the Board.

One more speech of his, which created a great stir at the time, must be referred to, namely his expression of undisguised hostility to the system of education maintained by the Ultramontane section of the Roman Catholics. (Cp.  “Scientific Education” “Collected Essays” 3 page 111.) In October the bye-laws came up for consideration.  One of them provided that the Board should pay over direct to denominational schools the fees for poor children.  This he opposed on the ground that it would lead to repeated contests on the Board, and further, might be used as a tool by the Ultramontanes for their own purposes.  Believing that their system as set forth in the syllabus, of securing complete possession of the minds of those whom they taught or controlled, was destructive to all that was highest in the nature of mankind, and inconsistent with intellectual and political liberty, he considered it his earnest duty to oppose all measures which would lead to assisting the Ultramontanes in their purpose.

Hereupon he was vehemently attacked, for example, in the “Times” for his “injudicious and even reprehensible tone” which “aggravated the difficulties his opponents might have in giving way to him.”  Was this, it was asked, the way to get Roman Catholic children to the Board schools?  Was it not an abandonment of the ideal of compulsory education?

It is hardly necessary to point out that the question was not between the compulsory inclusion or exclusion of poor children, but between their admission at the cost of the Board to schools under the Board’s own control or outside it.  In any case the children of Roman Catholics were not likely to get their own doctrines taught in Board Schools, and without this they declared they would rather go without education at all.