y day in practice; and, so long as this is the case, a law
levelled at the employer is preferable."
But when those words were written, compulsion was near at hand. The
Parliament of 1868-1874--the first elected by a democratic
suffrage--was intent on Reform, and the right of a father to starve his
child's mind was strenuously denied. Forster, then Vice-President of the
Council, was charged with the duty of preparing a Bill to establish
Compulsory Education. Arnold was Forster's brother-in-law, and "heard
the contents" of the Bill in November, 1869. When in the following
February it was brought in, he wrote: "I think William's Bill will do
very well. I am glad it is so little altered"; and, after the Second
Reading, he wrote: "The majority on the Education Bill is a great
relief; it will now, if William has tolerable luck, get through safely
this session." By this time, therefore, he must have become a convert to
the system of compulsion. Perhaps he regarded the demand for the Bill as
a proof that the English people were at length waking up to a sense of
the value of Education. But, while the State thus outstripped his ideal
by establishing compulsion, it fell short of his ideal by severely
limiting the area of the population to which compulsion was to apply.
Again and again he warned his countrymen, then unaccustomed to the
practical working of Compulsory Education, that it would be intolerable,
unjust, and absurd if it were applied only to the children of the poor.
He contended that the Upper and Middle Classes were every bit as much
in need of a compulsory system, if their children were to be properly
educated, as the working classes for whom it was proposed to legislate.
This theme he illustrated, with the most exuberant fun and fancy, in a
letter addressed to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1867, and afterwards
republished in _Friendship's Garland_. Arminius, the cultivated
Prussian, accompanies his English friend to Petty Sessions in a country
town, and is horrified by the degraded plight of an old peasant who is
tried for poaching. The English friend (the imaginary Arnold) says that
for his own part he is not so much concerned about the poacher as about
his children. They are being allowed to grow up anyhow. Really he thinks
the time has come when compulsion must be applied to the education of
children of this class. "The gap between them and our educated and
intelligent classes is really too frightful."
"_Your educ
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