222 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
of female learning.’ Two of the first students in Queen’s College were 
Frances Mary Buss and Dorothea Beale. To-day, when we visit the 
Frances Mary Buss Schools in North London, and the Ladies’ College in 
Cheltenham, do we realise that we are seeing as great a revolution in 
education as when we visit Wykeham’s foundations at Winchester and 
Oxford, or stand in the early quadrangle of Merton College at Oxford or 
of Peterhouse at Cambridge. In Miss Buss, whose creation of the North 
London Collegiate School came first and who was also the creator of the 
Head Mistresses’ Association, and in Miss Beale, we have two Pioneers 
who stand and always will stand, in a class by themselves. They are as 
great and creative revolutionaries as were St. Francis and St. Dominic in 
the thirteenth century. And yet Frances Mary Buss is omitted from 
the Dictionary of National Biography—perhaps because omission is 
a more eloquent testimony to distinction than four columns of obituary 
epitaph. 
' To these two I would add one other name, Sarah Emily Davies, who, 
if any one person founded Girton College, was that one person: and with 
the foundation of Girton College began the second part of the revolution 
—the admission of women to a University education. 
I mentioned the Forster Education Act of 1870 casually because I have 
never been able to regard that Act as a revolutionary or a creative measure 
in the true sense of the term. It was essentially a compromise; it 
gathered together into a single statute forces, movements and principles 
which had been operating for at least twenty years previously, but it 
expressed no new principle and enshrined neither really new methods nor 
new and constructive ideals. And its most conspicuous defect was that 
it made no attempt to correlate the Elementary Education that it re- 
organised with the existing system of Secondary Education, so as to bring 
the inevitable development of both into an organic and fruitful union. 
This is only another way of saying that Forster was not a great Education 
Minister ; he was a high-minded Statesman of remarkable ability, courage 
and independence, who showed greater imagination and vision in imperial 
policy than in education. And it is remarkable that from 1815 to 1916 we 
have no Education Minister or Statesman of the first rank, no political 
mind of the first order devoting supreme powers of brain and imagination 
to Education and leaving it permanently in his debt. 
What would have been revolutionary in 1870 would have been the 
translation into legislation and administration of the principles of the 
Birmingham group who fought to make primary education ‘ Secular, 
compulsory, and free,’ and who really compelled the Liberal Government 
of 1870 to legislate and were given the Act of 1870, which they denounced 
as a betrayal by the Government and a treacherous surrender by the 
Minister. If England does not love Coalitions she loves revolutions still 
less, and least of all, revolutions in education inaugurated by governments. 
In 1871 England was as unready for primary education, ‘ Secular, com- 
pulsory and free,’ as were the United States for Prohibition in 1917. 
I am getting near the end of my Staff ride. After 1870 the two most 
conspicuous new elements (apart from the Act of 1902, of which my old 
chief, Sir William Anson, was one of the main authors) surely are first, the 
Adult Education Movement, and the advent of Psychology. 
