216 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES, 
have no fruits of research to offer you, unless a prolonged experience and 
still more prolonged reflection could be dressed up to look like the majestic 
divinity of Research. I propose, therefore, to offer you some of these 
considered reflections in the form of a Centenary Survey which on this 
occasion is, I hope, both pardonable and appropriate. 
My title, I agree, may mean little or nothing or much. Permit me, 
therefore, to explain briefly that I am not going to waste your time with 
a synthetic, unpalatable but probably familiar summary of the evolution 
of educational theory, practice, development and administration between 
1830 and 1931; I am not going to drench you with dates, names and 
statistics, scientifically labelled and sorted with platitudinous or provocative 
adjectives dogmatically attached ; least of all have I any desire to gut the 
large historical text-books and the still larger squadrons of blue books and 
compress the vivisection into a miniature panorama of an astonishing 
century of effort and achievement. For astonishing it surely is. The 
more you study the situation round about 1830; the more you know from 
first-hand study of the sources of all that has happened after 1830, and 
the more that you know of the situation and tendencies of to-day, the 
more you will be impressed with the quality, quantity and scope of the 
work done and the results achieved. It is a commonplace to emphasise 
in the last hundred years the progress of physical and natural science. 
That progress has been equalled and in some respects surpassed by what 
has been done in Education—and, to anticipate one of my conclusions, 
with the same broad general effect. Just as in physical and natural 
science, so in Education the most striking result of a century of unflagging 
and remarkable progress has been the revelation of the extent of our own 
ignorance and of the difficulties of the fundamental and as yet unsolved 
problems. 
My modest task, therefore, in the limited time at my disposal, is to 
invite you to accompany me on what the Higher Command of the Army 
calls a Staff ride. Our ground is a Century ; our object is to make both 
a strategical and tactical map—with future operations in our mind. 
First, we must drive 1931 out of our consciousness, to be suppressed in 
a subliminal limbo until we are ready by and by to invoke it back for 
sublimated treatment ; we must see the England of 1820 to 1830 as that 
generation saw it. 
With Castlereagh’s death in 1822 began the reform movement in every 
branch of the nation’s life which culminated in the great Reform Act of 
1832. The waters which for thirty years had been dammed up in England 
since the French Revolution began slowly to pour through the dykes, 
until finally the whole structure of our institutions and habits seem to be 
submerged. I emphasise in this intellectual and political ferment three 
general points, the significance of which will be, I hope, more apparent 
later on; first, the power of influence of the utilitarian group, the 
Benthamites, because they provide one more striking example of what can 
be accomplished by a small body of able men with a definite creed, a 
definite objective and the high and passionate seriousness that high and 
passionate purposes alone can inspire; secondly, the forces and 
personalities which made the Oxford Movement; Keble’s Sermon on 
‘National Apostasy ’ in 1833 which, in Newman’s judgment, started the 
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