SHOOTING    NIAGARA	209
school attendance.1 Yet its underlying principle served the
ends of organised Labour, not only by bringing cheap education
within reach of the workers but by its indirect check on the com-
petition of juvenile labour and its tendency to raise adult wages.
A strong demand arose, therefore, to extend its scope. In 1876 a
Conservative government tightened the obligations of parents
and in 1880 a Liberal government made them universally com-
pulsory. In 1891 another Conservative administration dispensed
with fees and made elementary education free for all. Thus both
parties acknowledged the collecrivist principle that the rich should
be compelled to contribute to the education of the poor.
The insignificance of the contribution could not alter the sig-
nificance of the principle. Once established, the pressure of
electoral numbers was sure in the end to do more. Because of
the normal Anglo-Saxon indifference to the claims of intellect,
the advance of state education was at first deliberate rather
than rapid. But the figures speak for themselves. In 1870 the
total grant out of revenue towards national education was
£912,000. By 1888 it had risen to £4,168,000. By 1905 it was
nearly £11,000,000 and the contribution from local rates another
£7,000,000. At the turn of the century London alone was paying
a million a year or £28 per child—almost the equivalent of a con-
temporary farm labourer's wage. After the liberal triumph in
1906 school medical services were established and public funds
afforded for feeding necessitous children. To an old Chartist,
who fifty years before had paid 6d. a week for his fees at a night
school, the new policy appeared one of *coddling." "It is well
to educate the people," he wrote, "but the tendency of much of
the School Board policy of the day is to pauperise the people.
Yet School Boards ought, above all things, to beware of under-
mining the independence of the individual."2
In municipal administration the collectivist advance was even
more striking. Within a generation a vast new vested interest,
officially subordinated to the general will as expressed in local
1A few years after the Act a visit by two antiquarians to the dingy neighbourhood
of Tuthill Stairs, Newcastle, caused a panic among the mothers of the place who,
mistaking the learned gentlemen for school inspectors, made a rush to hide their
children.—W. £. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, //, 575.
2 W. -E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom* //, 109-10. Young Reginald Brett*
afterwards Lord Esher, was wiser. "It is pleasant to see small and dirty boys reading
the labels in the shop windows," he wrote in 1874. "It is one of the signs of the
happier future. Shall I live to see education of children forced upon parents? Why can
it not be done? That great good which must come, but for which we have to linger
and wait?"— Journals and Letters of Vtxount Esher^ /, zr.