as not a "hush up." If I had taken it to be such, I
should have refused to have anything to do with it....

There has never been the slightest ambiguity about my position
in the matter; in fact, if you will turn to one paper on the
School Board written by me before my election in 1870, I
think you will find that I anticipated the pith of the present
discussion.

The persons who agreed to the compromise did exactly what all
sincere men who agree to compromise do. For the sake of
the enormous advantage of giving the rudiments of a decent
education to several generations of the people, they accepted
what was practically an armistice in respect of certain
matters about which the contending parties were absolutely
irreconcilable.

To return to his activity on the School Board. His vigorous work as
chairman of the committee appointed to frame an educational scheme was
marked by great breadth of view. He desired the elementary schools
to be linked at the one end with infant schools; at the other with
continuation schools and some scheme for technical education. A
perfect scheme would provide what he first called a ladder from the
gutter to the university, whereby children of exceptional capacity
might reach the places for which nature had fitted them. His sense of
fitness would have welcomed even more warmly some system whereby the
incompetent born into the higher strata of the social organism should
be automatically graded down to the positions more appropriate to
their wits and character. But this is an ideal only possible in
Plato's State, where philosophers are kings and possess superhuman
power of intuition.

Sincerity is sometimes impracticable. But here sincerity was combined
with common-sense practicality, and even an opponent like Lord
Shaftesbury was impelled to write in his journal:--"Professor Huxley
has this definition of morality and religion: 'Teach a child what is
wise: that is _morality_. Teach him what is wise and beautiful: that
is _religion!_' Let no one henceforth despair of making things clear
and of giving explanations!"

He did not, however, disguise his fundamental opposition to
Ultramontanism, that intellectual and social _imperium in imperio_,
with its basic hostility to the free scientific spirit. This he had
already expressed in his "Scientific Education" (_Coll. Ess._, iii,
111), an address of 1869, and he repeated it towards the end of hi