H. Wells: THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated

vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner

in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced north, and the

back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that

yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and

imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes

of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for

my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was

thirteen.

My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not

always goodideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster

and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father

had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and

diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small

private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.

Thereupon my father had roused himselfand had qualified as a

science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these

days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass

of the English population, and had thrown himselfinto science

teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if

transitory zeal and success.

I do not rememberanything of my father's earlier and more energetic

time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married

when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw

only the last decadent phase of his educational career.

The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the

world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness

and generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spiritsurvive,

more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.

The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how

many of the clumsy and limitedgoverning bodies of my youth and

early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient

machinery. When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was

ruled by a strange body called a Local Board-it was the Age of

Boards-and I still rememberindistinctly my father rejoicing at the

breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and

devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there

were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics

before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading

tentacles of the London County Council.

It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State

to rememberthat the very beginnings of public education lie within

my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic

people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of

the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people who could

neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature,

were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the

population were getting no instruction at all. Only a few schools

flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the

country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and

dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the new great

centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the

factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and

under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary

contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight

against this festering darkness. It was a conditionof affairs

clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of

indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were

possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian

will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the

commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian

enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.

I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social

institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they

should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust

of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the

general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about

the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train

teachers, build and 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 seefit to

send into the world. In this way it was feltthe 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 doubtthe

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 seewhat 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 objectof the teaching was to teach people not science,

but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-

earning assumed a formeasily distinguished from any kind of genuine

education whatever.

Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spiritof

the age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science

prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I rememberrightly, 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 goodthing of the books. A number of

competing firms of publishers sprang into existencespecialising in

Science and Art Department work; they set themselvesto produce

text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of

knowledgenecessary for every stage of each of five and twenty

subjects into which desirablescience was divided, and copies and

models and instructions that should give precisely the method and

gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book

was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactoryto the