208	ENGLISHSAGA
Education and municipal reform were the intellectual themes
of the hour. The need for the first impressed even reactionaries.
* We must educate our masters," Robert Lowe had declared before
the passing of Disraeli's Reform Bill. The older ideal of education
based on religion and the teaching of hereditary crafts in the
home had vanished with the migration into the towns. Only
the most rudimentary instruction in reading, writing and
arithmetic had as yet taken its place. The great mass of the
nation was illiterate.^1 In 1869 only one British child in two
was receiving any education at all. Of those, more than half were
being taught in schools maintained by the Church of England,
which together with other denominational and voluntary schools
had for some time been in receipt of small government grants-
in-aid.
In 1870 William Edward Forster, the Quaker Vice-President of
Gladstone's first liberal administration, introduced an Education
Act, setting up compulsory Local School Boards to provide
secular elementary education for all children between the ages of
five and thirteen^2 not already provided for by denominational
schools. The cost was met partly out of state grants and rates and
partly out of parents' fees. Owing to jealousy between the
churches, the principle was laid down that all grant-aided educa-
tion should be unsectarian. By this means religious teaching
inspired by conviction was virtually ruled out. It thus came
about—though no one seems to have realised it at the time—that
the idealism of future generations, founded on a secular state
education, differed from that of the old, which still derived
from the Christian ethic. Between the two was to arise an
almost .unbridgeable gulf of misunderstanding.
Forster's Act affected little more than half the children in the
country. It was unpopular with working-class parents who
resented the limitation put on the family earning capacity by
^1 The ignorance of the young factory operatives in the 'forties—the forerunners of
the new urban nation—is illustrated by the Report of the Childrens* Employment
Commission, cited by Engels in his Condition of the Working Class in England, 112-13.
"Several had never heard the name of the Queen nor other-names, such as Nelson,
Wellington, Bonaparte; but it was noteworthy that those who had never heard even
of St. Paul, Moses, or Solomon, were very well instructed as to the life, deeds, and
character of Dick Turpin, and especially of Jack Sheppard. . . ."
"To the question who Christ was, Home received the following answers among
others: * He was Adam'; * He was an Apostle'; * He was the Saviour's Lord's Son*;
and from a youth of sixteen, * He was a king of London long ago.' *
*The school leaving age was raised to 14 in 1900 by a Conservative Government
which in the previous year established a national Board of Education.