L.—EDUCATION. 217 
Oxford Movement proper, only gave expression to a new interpretation of 
national life that had been fermenting for years, above all, in Oriel College, 
and Oriel College is for the Oxford Movement what Assisi is for the 
Franciscan revolution: in a word, the Oxford Movement brought into the 
arena a new conception of the Spiritual as a formative force in life, and we 
shall fail to understand the Nineteenth Century problem of religion in 
Education if we do not remember this: thirdly, I put the organised and 
widespread campaign against ‘ignorance’ as an evil and a national vice, 
which led to the foundation in 1827 of the Society for the Diffusion of 
Useful Knowledge. There is no more entertaining guide to this period 
in our history than Peacock’s novels, every one of which is a roman 4 clef. 
You will recall particularly in Crotchet Castle the delicious play that 
Peacock makes with ‘the March of Mind,’ that slogan, as we should say 
to-day, which captured the intelligentsia of England and was the direct 
creation of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and many 
other similar organisations. In the irresistible ‘ March of Mind,’ England 
was to become united, happy, prosperous and free. Is it not the character- 
istic of all revolutionary movements that they start from an infallible 
faith in the perfectibility in a short period of the human species and end 
with a remorseless tyranny over a human species that refuses to perfect 
itself ? 
Study the correspondence of the leading figures in the decade from 
1822 to 1832, and you invariably find either an extravagant fear that 
England is stumbling to her doom or a no less extravagant expectation 
that in a few more years of drastic reform England will have entered the 
Promised Land. To the one type of mind the question is: What can be 
saved from the coming cataclysm? To the other type the question is: 
What is the next Jericho whose walls will fall by the sword of the Lord 
and of Bentham ? 
Let us focus our attention on the strictly educatignal field. The 
primary sources are particularly rich, for apart from numerous pamphlets 
we have the Parliamentary ie ee the Quarterly and Edinburgh, 
Reviews and (after 1824) the Westminster Review, the organ of the 
Benthamites, and for 1831-1835 the six volumes (and no more) of the 
Quarterly Journal of Education, supplemented by the letters in many 
biographies, and many volumes of sermons and pamphlets. Remember, 
please, that Raikes had started his Sunday Schools as far back as 1780, 
that Bell’s “ Madras System,’ Lancaster and Owen’s epoch-making school 
experiments had long been topics for admiration, imitation and ferocious 
controversy ; that Froebel at Keilhau, Pestalozzi at Yverdun had accom- 
plished their work, and that before 1830 Herbart had thought out and 
published in German the substance of his system. But neither in the 
educational literature nor in the furious controversies of the time will 
you find that Froebel, Pestalozzi or Herbart were known or that anyone 
supposed that in fifty or sixty years these would be spell-binding names 
in every text-book. The explanation may be, as Pusey maintained of the 
theology of this period, that only about three persons, of whom he was 
one, could read German with ease. At any rate, Froebel, Pestalozzi and 
Herbart, like the early plays of Bernard Shaw and like Mendel i in Biology, 
were to smite England after travelling from Germany to the United 
