220 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
on the intrinsic merit of the subject as a branch of knowledge, and without 
any reference to the result in the type of mind or character that a reformed 
system was to produce. And a dreary study of much dead controversy 
has left on my mind a depressing impression that conservatives and 
reformers alike completely forgot that the method and the amount of any 
subject in a curriculum may be even more important than the subject 
itself, intrinsically considered. Be that as it may, this period from 1825 
to 1840 brought the whole question of curriculum into the disconcerting 
light of day; and if it is the duty of every generation when it cannot 
solve a problem to make it impossible for its successors to evade it, the 
generation of the Reform Act at least did that part of its duty very 
faithfully. 
The next thirty years, ending roughly in Forster’s Education Act, were 
to be not less abundant in controversy but more fruitful in positive and 
lasting achievement. Superficially regarded, they might be called the 
age of Royal and Governmental Commissions. The State was, therefore, 
proclaiming its right, bitterly contested and resented, to inquire into the 
working of educational institutions—-Universities, Endowed Public 
Schools, Secondary Grammar Schools—over which it had _ neither 
administrative nor educational nor financial control. The transition 
from education as an optional function, to education as a national duty of, 
the State was being rapidly effected in these thirty years. 
But apart from this really momentous evolution of applied political 
theory, what else are we bound to note, in our Staff ride, as peaks ? Three 
points in particular. First, then, the slow revolution effected in the 
Endowed Public Schools. We owe this to four pioneer Headmasters who, 
in an age of remarkable personalities, stand out pre-eminent. For the 
acid test and infallible criterion of the pioneer in all spheres of human 
activity is that after his work has been done, the sphere in which he has 
done it is qualitatively different. Only too often so decisively does the 
result pass into the texture of everyday thought and action that we 
can only judge its originality by a study of the conditions prior to the 
pioneer. It is thus that we judge the work of a Newton, an Adam Smith, 
a Niebuhr, a Darwin, or a Pasteur. And it is thus that we can safely 
regard Arnold at Rugby, 1828-1842, Benjamin Hall Kennedy at 
Shrewsbury from 1836-1866, Edward Thring at Uppingham, 1853-1887, 
Haig-Brown, the Second Founder of Charterhouse, 1863-1897: and if 
I extend my period considerably, I add a fifth, in Sanderson of Oundle, 
1892-1922. These were all men of very different fibre, outlook on life, 
intellectual power and quality of scholarship. But they had one uniting 
link and characteristic, they were great teachers because they were great 
personalities ; they were great organisers because they had the gift of 
leadership: and they left on their generation, on their staffs who knew 
them, on their boys, on all indeed with whom they came into contact an 
ineffaceable stamp of power and inspiration, the combination of 
individuality and experience, and they created an inexhaustible tradition 
for the institutions that they remoulded. In the firmament of education 
there have been, there are, and there will be, many lamps shining with 
different rays and varying intensity when focussed in the spectrum of 
spirit and mind, but these five great names—Arnold, Kennedy, Haig- 
