ocal boards was stubbornly contested, in spite, says Mr. Gladstone, "of
the unvarying good temper, signal ability and conciliatory spirit of Mr.
Forster," and it was not until after fourteen divisions that a few
assuaging words from Mr. Gladstone brought the handful of conservative
opposition to reason. It was five o'clock before the unflagging prime
minister found his way homewards in the broad daylight.

It is impossible to imagine a question on which in a free government it
was more essential to carry public opinion with the law. To force parents
to send children to school, was an enterprise that must break down if
opinion would not help to work it. Yet probably on no other question in
Mr. Gladstone's career as law-maker was common opinion so hard to weigh,
to test, to focus and adjust. Of the final settlement of the question of
religious instruction, Mr. Gladstone said to Lord Lyttelton when the
battle was over (Oct. 25, '70):--

... I will only say that it was in no sense my choice or that of
the government. Our first proposition was by far the best. But it
received no active support even from the church, the National
Society, or the opposition, while divers bishops, large bodies of
clergy, the Education Union, and earliest of all, I think,
Roundell Palmer in the House of Commons, threw overboard the
catechism. We might then have fallen back upon the plan of
confining the application of the rate to secular subjects; but
this was opposed by the church, the opposition, most of the
dissenters, and most of our own friends. As it was, I assure you,
the very utmost that could be done was to arrange the matter as it
now stands, where the exclusion is limited to the formulary, and
to get rid of the popular imposture of undenominational
instruction.

(M96) At bottom the battle of the schools was not educational, it was
social. It was not religious but ecclesiastical, and that is often the
very contrary of religious. In the conflicts of the old centuries whence
Christian creeds emerged, disputes on dogma constantly sprang from
rivalries of race and accidents of geography. So now quarrels about
education and catechism and conscience masked the standing jealousy
between church and chapel--the unwholesome fruit of the historic mishaps of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that separated the nation into two
camps, and invested one of them with all the pomp and pr