nd equip
schools, endow pedagogic research, and provide properly written
school-books. These things it was felt MUST be provided by individual
and local effort, and since it was manifest that it was individual
and local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly agreed to
stimulate them by money payments. The State set up a machinery of
examination both in Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and
payments, known technically as grants, were made in accordance with the
examination results attained, to such schools as Providence might see
fit to send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would
be established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,
inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was
created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.

In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but
Grant-earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far
as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the task
of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the most
part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also were teaching
similar classes to those they examined, it was feared that injustice
might be done. Year after year these eminent persons set questions
and employed subordinates to read and mark the increasing thousands of
answers that ensued, and having no doubt the national ideal of fairness
well developed in their minds, they were careful each year to re-read
the preceding papers before composing the current one, in order to see
what it was usual to ask. As a result of this, in the course of a
few years the recurrence and permutation of questions became almost
calculable, and since the practical object of the teaching was to teach
people not science, but how to write answers to these questions, the
industry of Grant-earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any
kind of genuine education whatever.

Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of the
age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science prevalent at
this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by making graduates in
arts and priests in the established church Science Teachers EX OFFICIO,
and leaving local and private enterprise to provide schools, diagrams,
books, material, according to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in
the district. Private enterprise made a particularly good