SIR JOSHUA FITCH
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SIR JOSHUA FITCH
Hn Hccount of bis %tfe arto Morfe
BY
A. L. LILLEY, M.A.
VICAR OF ST. MARY'S, PADDINGTON GREEN
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W.
I 906
[A II rights reserved]
PREFACE
WHEN, at Lady Fitch's request, I undertook
the task of preparing a brief memoir of her
husband, I knew well the difficulties that stood
in the way of its successful accomplishment. I
cannot hope that I have overcome those diffi-
culties, but at least I have attempted to keep
them in mind throughout. The plan of this brief
sketch of a strenuous character and a laborious
life is the result of that attempt. I have tried to
make a too little considered, but highly important,
fragment of our national history tell the story of
a man who was himself a chief part of it.
It is to Sir Joshua Fitch himself that I owe
it if I have at all succeeded in conveying what
he was and what he did. Though I had long
known him through his writings, it was only
during the last three years of his life that I knew
him personally. During those years we met
frequently, and I learned to know and to value
his controlled enthusiasm, his moderating temper,
his shrewd and penetrating judgment. I have
not read for the purposes of this memoir a
single line of a report or an article written by
him without feeling in it and through it the spirit
of the man I knew and honoured.
253255
vi PREFACE
My most liberal thanks are due to Lady Fitch
and Miss Pickton for their continuous help at every
stage of the work. To all whose ' appreciations '
of Sir Joshua's work appear in the text, and, in
addition, to Archbishop Walsh, of Dublin ; to Sir
Henry Craik ; to Mr. M. E. Sadler ; to Mr. Oscar
Browning ; to Canon Bell, late Headmaster of
Marlborough ; to Professor Hales ; to the Bishop
of Exeter ; to the Bishop of Ripon ; to Bishop
Welldon ; to the Dean of Ripon ; to Dr. Paton,
of Nottingham ; to Mr. Madjarkar, C.S.I. ; to
Dr. Edwin Abbott ; to Mr. Arthur Milman ; to
Mr. Alfred Perceval Graves ; to Mr. Henderson ;
to Mr. Wix ; to Dr. Wormell ; to Mr. Baptiste
Scoones ; to Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace ; to
Mr. Courthope Bowen ; to Mr. Marvin ; to the
late Rev. C. Du Port ; to Miss Manley ; to Miss
McKee ; to the Rev. J. P. Faunthorpe ; to
Prebendary Hobson ; to Mr. H. Garrod ; to
M. Esclangon ; to Mr. Colvill ; to Miss Lohse ;
to the Rev, J. Rice Byrne ; to Sir William
Bousfield ; to Mr. Murch ; to Dr. Rigg, of the
Wesley an Training College ; to Mr. S. R. Fuller ;
to Mr. Hodgson Pratt ; to Miss Ridley ; to Mr.
Currey ; to Mr. Dugard ; to Mr. E. D. J. Wilson ;
to Mr. Walter Baily ; to Dr. Sophie Bryant ; to
Mr. H. W. Simpkinson, C.B. ; to Dr. Kimmins ;
to Mr. C. Broughton ; and to Mrs. Gillman, I am
indebted for most valued aid.
A. L. LILLE Y.
April, 1906.
CONTENTS
CUA PTEK PAGE
I. EARLY LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS - 1
II. HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS - 22
III. COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES - 66
IV. UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS - -100
v. WOMEN'S EDUCATION - 129
VI. A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT' - - 163
VII. OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS - - 194
VIII. THE REST OF A WORKER - - 224
BIBLIOGRAPHY 256
INDEX - - .... 259
PORTRAIT OF SIR JOSHUA FITCH
Vll
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
JOSHUA GIRLING FITCH was born in Southwark
in the year 1824. His father and mother were
both Colchester people who had come to London
and settled down in Southwark shortly after their
marriage in 1821. The mother especially seems
to have inherited in a remarkable degree the
practical gifts of character and the spirit of sober
religious mysticism which have been almost the
customary heritage of members of the East
Anglian stock. Her distinguished son, early
separated from his family by the engrossing claims
of a vocation unfamiliar to the simple interests
of the Southwark household, always retained the
most grateful memory of his mother's intelligent
sympathy with, and wise encouragement of, those
arduous intellectual ambitions which had pledged
him to a path increasingly remote from her
own. She was deeply religious, had a keen and
1
2 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
masculine intelligence, and gave habitual proof of
that native wisdom which can meet the necessary
sacrifices of life with an even mind and a sunny
heart. This, at least, is the picture which her son
retained of her into his latest years. His father
he remembered chiefly as a man of immense
energy and capacity for work, impatient of the
least evidence of indolence in his children. ' Don't
let the grass grow under your feet/ was an admo-
nition so often heard from him that in after-years
it was always associated for his children with the
memory of his eager, active spirit.
Joshua was the second child of a family of
seven. The eldest son, Thomas, born in 1822,
became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church
while quite a young man, was ordained as a
member of the religious house of Notre Dame de
France, and still survives at the age of eighty-
four. William, the third son, born in 1826, was,
until not long before his death in 1892, head-
master of an Endowed School at Hitchin, in Hert-
fordshire. It is evident that the interests of the
family were naturally directed towards the things
of the mind and the soul. It is not wonderful if
for such boys the life of school was entered upon
as an avenue prolonging itself into a future which
would be only its extension and enlargement.
Though the family was poor, the boys were sent
early to a very good private day-school near their
EARLY LIFE 3
home, of which a Mr. Woodman was master.
Joshua soon displayed that aptitude for and de-
light in teaching which remained his chief charac-
teristic throughout life. There never, perhaps, was
a life in which there was less of the accidental ;
and certainly the essence of the man was that he
was a teacher. . It was the impulse of nature,
therefore, which combined with the necessity of
choosing a career when he became assistant
master at the Borough Road School.
It is difficult to get a clear picture of the life of
the boy at this time, emerging as he was into a
manhood which must already have been for him
full of intellectual possibilities. Fitch was one of
those men who could not easily talk about him-
self, or allow his early life to be an object of
sentimental curiosity even for those who by the
closest ties of life had some right to make it such.
Yet certain memories of that time would stray
occasionally, as if by accident, into his conver-
sation with those who were dearest to him and
with whom so many long years of his life were
spent, and have been by them affectionately
pieced together so as to form a consistent and
life-like impression of the boy who was father to
the man so well known in the world of affairs.
The picture thus formed is one of simplicity of life,
intense and unremitting energy, a love of work
which enabled him to find the only relief he
12
4 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
needed from the strain of incessant labour in its
variety, a kind of passion for usefulness, and an
interest in all that had to do with religion. He
had an iron constitution, a fact which enabled
him throughout life to make his plans with confi-
dence, and to execute them with certainty. He
was hardly ever throughout a long official life
compelled by illness to fail of an engagement
which he had made or which had been made for
him. This no doubt helped him in a special
degree in those early years of struggle, or, rather,
of patient, steady, sustained effort, for struggle
was a word which was wholly inapplicable to any
phase of Fitch's life or to anything which he did.
He had from the beginning that mastery of him-
self which made him a natural economist of every
gift he possessed and every opportunity which he
found. There has seldom been a life in which
there was less waste than his. Most men have
to resist and painfully to overcome the tendency
to waste waste of power, time, and opportunity.
They have powers which they do not discover at
all or discover late. There are opportunities
which they cannot see, or see through such a
refracting lens of defective judgment that they
cannot seize them. Fitch was by a happy gift of
nature saved from all these difficulties ; and the
gift of nature he discovered so early and used so
reverently that he converted it into a deft and
EARLY LIFE 5
almost instinctive art. It is this that explains
the insatiable energy of that early period in
which there went on together hard and already
skilful work as a teacher, personal study for the
special University course (he was preparing to
matriculate in the London University), omnivorous
general reading, especially among the English
classics, work as a Sunday-school teacher to
which he was devoted, and even practical social
work among the poor of his native district. Here
were all the absorbing interests of his later life in
germ. The experience out of which grew that
remarkable essay, ' The Sunday - School of the
Future/ published in ' Educational Aims and
Methods/ he had already begun to gather while
he was yet an assistant master in a school in
Southwark. The interest which made him for
years one of the most assiduous champions and
the wisest exponents of charity organization was
drawn from those far-off days.
His simple and profound reverence for the
things that are excellent, which made his
religion so sane and manly, so much a part of
himself, was of the same early growth. Brought
up in a home marked by a deep and practical
evangelical piety, he seems to have been in his
years of early manhood for some time a High
Churchman. It is one proof the more that the
influence of great movements, intellectual and
6 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
spiritual, tells principally and tells largely upon
young men of from twenty to twenty-five. We
think of the early Tractarian Movement probably
as confined mainly in its effect to the clergy and
the more thoughtful and earnest Oxford men of
the forties. But it told, no doubt, far beyond
the bounds of the University, wherever mind and
spirit were alert and open to the stirrings of a
new expression of the religious life. The move-
ment did not make a lasting impression upon
Fitch. No one knowing him in later years could
have suspected that its breath had, however
faintly, stirred the surface of his life. His
religion was of that kind which withdraws in-
stinctively from all expression save the simplest
and most necessary. Yet there were elements
in the earlier phases of Tractarianism which
appealed to him. Its earnest devotional spirit,
the ordered mysticism of personal character
which it tended to produce, its reverence for the
past, even such little things as the careful and
dignified use of language which it fostered, and
its popularization of the Latin of the Vulgate
these were things which in the varying measure
of their importance he valued highly. He was
a diligent and critical collector of old Latin and
classical English hymns ; he read his Greek Testa-
ment daily (the writer of this memoir possesses
one in miniature type which he used from the
EARLY LIFE 7
year 1849 till the day of his death); he was a
loving student (and not merely a student) of
the masterpieces of devotional literature ; and he
would insert in his delicate handwriting in the
fly-leaves of his favourite books some old Latin
phrase as delicate in sound and meaning. In
many ways Fitch's was a spirit which had a not
remote kinship with Keble's ; at least, they met
in a common quality of their religion its delicate
strength.
It was this life of varied and eager interests
which the young student had already made for
himself while labouring to acquire a liberal learn-
ing in the intervals left him by the arduous
work of teaching. After acting for some time as
assistant at the Borough Road School, he was
appointed to the headmastership of a school at
Kingsland. There he continued his reading in
the early mornings and deep into the night. But
he never allowed the claims of study to encroach
upon his interest in the work of the profession
which he had made his own. Already he was
mastering the principles and perfecting the
methods of education. How to teach seemed
to him already the most important of practical
studies, and how to teach meant how to make
interesting the thing taught, or, which is the
same thing, how to evoke the pupil's interest
in the thing learned. It was because he saw
8 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
this necessity so clearly that he took from the
first so vivid an interest in the teaching of read-
ing. He felt that half the work of education had
been completed when a child had been taught to
feel the charm of ordered words, and to that end
he laid the greatest stress upon clearness and
balance in reading. But this devotion to his
life-work necessarily delayed the progress of his
University studies. It was not till 1850 that he
took his Bachelor's degree, and two years later he
graduated as Master of Arts.
In 1852 Fitch was appointed tutor at the
Training College of the British and Foreign
School Society in the Borough Road. We have
already seen him engaged as assistant master in
the model school out of which the college grew.
There, indeed, he seems to have taught occasionally
since 1838, when he was only fourteen. The
mastership of the school was at that time in the
hands of a remarkable man, John Thomas Cross-
ley, one of Lancaster's pupils at Tooting. When
Crossley, who had retired from active work in
1851, died in 1889, Fitch described him in the
Times as one ' who possessed much of Lancaster's
fine enthusiasm and teaching power, with more
stability of character and greater intellectual
gifts.' And he added : * He had a remarkable
genius for organization and for securing the
loyalty and hearty co-operation of the more
EARLY LIFE 9
promising of his scholars, and the large school
in the Borough Road was in his hands a striking
example of what the monitorial method was
capable of at its best/ Crossley's influence was
evidently one of the most efficient in fostering
and directing the interests and enthusiasm of the
young student. It was fitting, therefore, that
one who traced his educational ancestry through
Crossley and Lancaster should begin his work for
English education as a member of the teaching
staff of the original and central school of the
whole Lancasterian system.
Joshua Fitch was very soon appointed Vice-
Principal of the college, and in 1856 he was
chosen to succeed Dr. Cornwell as Principal.
For seven years he remained at the head of
this institution, controlling and developing
the educational resources which a half-century's
application of Lancaster's system had amassed.
Fitch was one of those exceptional men of a
character so equable as to be unaffected by the
particular kind of duty entrusted to them so long
as they feel themselves equal to its performance.
Throughout a long life devoted to education he
was called upon to undertake at some time or
other almost every kind of duty which the cause
of education can impose. But he showed no
preferences. Every call which the great cause
made upon him was for the moment supreme in
10 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
his interests, and obtained from him a complete
devotion. Yet it may be doubted whether there
was any form of his many-sided work which he
so thoroughly enjoyed as the specific work of
teaching. Hence it was that those probationary
years at Borough Road were among the most
fruitful and influential of his whole career. The
direction of a large and important training college
made a call upon both those contrasted qualities
which he possessed in almost equal measure
enthusiasm and patience. There was in him
a liberal and almost passionate devotion to the
business of education which he had the gift of
readily communicating to others. And at the
same time he had the practical instinct which
speedily detects the principles of method, and the
patience which is needed to elaborate them into
an effective system. There are men who can
teach themselves, though they have no power of
systematizing for the benefit of others the method
which has made their own teaching successful.
There are others who have a natural facility in
analyzing and formulating the principles of
successful teaching, and yet have themselves no
capacity of applying them. But Fitch was a
happy combination of these two different sets of
qualities. A born teacher himself, he was, per-
haps, most successful in teaching others how to
teach. The character of his work at the Borough
EARLY LIFE 11
Road may be best described in the words of one
of his pupils there, the present Vice -Principal of
Isleworth College, Mr. W. Barkby :
'When I entered Borough Road College as a
student, its Principal was Sir Joshua, then Mr.
Fitch, and I had the great advantage of being
under his tuition for two years, and a junior
member of his staff for the next three years.
The Principal in those days was non-resident, and
his duties were almost limited to the direction of
the studies and professional training of the
students. For this work Sir Joshua was singu-
larly gifted. Himself a brilliant and sympathetic
teacher, he had a remarkable insight into the
character and needs of those whom he had to
train as schoolmasters. His lectures on method
were a revelation to us, and under his guidance
we saw our life's work in a new light. He not
only set before us the principles of the art of
teaching in lectures on school management, but
every lecture he gave us on any subject was also
a lesson on method. Sir Joshua's gifts of lucid
expression are well known to all students of
education, but in the close intimacy of the class-
room, where we were encouraged to bring up
questions and difficulties, these gifts had special
opportunities. Most pupil-teachers at that time
had received a somewhat narrow education, and
it was an immense help to them to come under
12 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the influence of a man of varied reading and
wide sympathies. He strove to cultivate in us a
love of literature, and I remember with especial
pleasure the weekly hour set apart on Friday after-
noons, when he read to us his favourite passages
from famous books. He had a beautiful voice,
and his keen appreciation of literary style made
his readings most attractive. He brought home
to us more particularly the literary beauty of the
Bible, and the readings from it were selected so
as to leave behind them valuable though un-
formulated religious lessons.
* On rare occasions I saw Sir Joshua teach a
class of children, always a delightful exercise to
him. He had a remarkable power of winning
their confidence, attracting their interest, and
holding their attention, and extraordinary skill
in drawing out their intelligence by questions.
' The influence which Sir Joshua Fitch exercised
upon education in England by his official work in
the Education Department, and by his public
speeches and writings, great as it was, is not
comparable to the abiding force and value of his
direct instruction and example to teachers of all
grades, and more especially to those who enjoyed
the first-fruits of his thoughts on education in
the colleges of the British and Foreign School
Society/
But these years of his |)rincipalship were full
EARLY LIFE 13
of other than professional interests. In 1856
Mr. Fitch married Emma, daughter of Mr. Joseph
Barber Wilks, who held an important position in
the service of the Honourable East India Com-
pany. The connection with the Company was
hereditary in the family, for Mr. Wilks's father
and grandfather had preceded him in its service.
His only brother, the Rev. S. C. Wilks, was for
many years Rector of Nursling, near Southamp-
ton, and had, while still a curate at Exeter, been
appointed to the editorship of the Christian Obser-
ver by Zachary Macaulay, a post which he occu-
pied for forty years. Shortly after their marriage,
Mr. and Mrs. Fitch went to live in a house at
Denmark Hill, a neighbourhood full of the rural
charm which at that period distinguished the
southern outskirts of London. Here they entered
upon that life of varied interests and ideal happi-
ness which they so completely shared with one
another for nearly half a century. Never were
partners in the married life more necessary or
more sufficient to each other. All who knew
them felt the peculiar charm of their home, the
charm of a sunny cheerfulness, of a refined simpli-
city of life, of a happy social instinct which
naturally drew fit friends about them, and of a
vivid interest in all serious public affairs. Wher-
ever they went they became the centre of a
thoughtful and earnest circle of friends. They
14 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
were denied the blessing of children, though both
of them loved children, and had the childlike
freshness of nature which immediately wins their
confidence. But after they settled at York, in
1863, they adopted the younger daughter of
Mrs. Pickton, Mrs. Fitch's sister, and the child
grew up to fill the vacant place in the home.
There was a generous and abundant humanity
about both of them which pervaded their home-life,
and made its social duties as great a pleasure to
themselves as to their friends. They had neither
of them time or interest to waste in anything
that savoured of mere social convention or
display. But they had always time to spend,
and they always thought it well spent, in enlarg-
ing and cultivating their acquaintance among all
sorts of people to whom they were attracted by
the seriousness of their interests, or the originality
or simplicity of their character. With a natural
hospitality of heart they drew such people about
them, or were instinctively drawn to the places
where they were to be found.
In this, as in everything else, Fitch was marked
by that economy of force which was the most
consistent note of his character. His social duties
were fulfilled with the same punctilious thorough-
ness which he carried into the discharge of official
duty. But though the sense of duty was appar-
ent in all that he did, it was everywhere trans-
EARLY LIFE 15
formed into a frank and satisfying pleasure. His
whole life was an echo of the spirit of his favourite
Wordsworth's address to Duty :
* Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face.'
Already in these years at Denmark Hill Fitch's
instinct for friendship was finding abundant room
to express itself. He seemed to know at once
the people for whom he would care, and this
selective habit grew in him with the passing of
the years. But age brought no closing of the
heart, as it does to most men. To the end he
had an eye for new friends. Something which
appealed to him in look or voice would lead
to a friendship to which he was ready to
devote, as a mere matter of course, the best of
himself. He always hurried back on his wife's
'at home' days, so that he might not miss
any one of their friends. If some unavoidable
business engagement had made him late, he
would eagerly inquire who had been there, and
what they had had to say of interest. It seemed
to him a positive loss that he should miss the
sight of a friendly face, or the news of the things
which his friends had been doing or thinking.
And it was not merely his intellectual or social
equals that interested him. He grew to know
every familiar figure on his walks to and from
16 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
his district in Lambeth or, in later years, his
club shoeblacks, newspaper boys, and their like.
He knew their history, probably more of it than
they told him or could tell him, for he was a
skilled reader of character, the secret foundation
and source of all personal histories. He delighted
in the busy life of the streets. He would hang
for a moment, in his busy passage to and fro,
on the skirts of crowds, attracted by their
childish but truly human curiosity, impressed
by their careless, cheerful good-nature, assessing
probably, with his quick instinct, the moral force
and the moral risks of these chance aggregates
of humanity.
The streets had, of course, other delights for
him as well. The leisure of his homeward way
made the opportunity for that visit to the book-
stall, which, in his orderly life, took its due place
as one of its minor pleasures. Yet, man of books
and master of books as he was, it was men that
attracted him most. 'Life is so interesting/ he
would say as he revived some memory of the
streets, or carefully recalled some chance observa-
tion of his homeward walk. And it was an
interpretation of himself. Much as he loved
nature, he loved men more. The part of his
holiday that he enjoyed most was some early-
morning hour in the market or the church of
some foreign town, where men were happy in
EARLY LIFE 17
their business of unrestrained garrulous bargain-
ing, or silent for a moment in the presence of an
eternal mystery. He could extract the secret of
such situations and such moments. They were
an occasion of simple, unaffected pleasure to him
at the moment, a field for reflection and a source
of inspiration in the retrospect.
It was this interest in everything human, and
the rich stores of observation and knowledge
which he gradually amassed by its means, that
gave character to his consistent devotion to all
social questions. Like all successful workers in
that field, he was always a learner, never a
doctrinaire. This kind of work occupied so much
of his attention, and formed so large a part of the
best effort of his life, that it will be necessary, at
a later stage, to appraise it more fully. But it
may be said here that he had a healthy distrust
of all attempts at social reform which were not
founded on accurate and first-hand knowledge,
and applied by means of personal service. To
him the social question was supremely a moral
question. It was not that he did not believe in
legislation, but that he thoroughly understood
the limits of its action and effect. He saw with
his wise insight into fact that outward change is
useless if it moves faster than inward power or
inclination to use it. He felt the stupidity of
much of the discussion as to the precedence of
2
1& SIR JOSHUA FITCH
moral or material change. He realized that in
life they are so related that they must both
appear together. But he knew that the vital
precedence lay with the vital factor in the com-
plex changes which make up what we call social
reform, and that the vital factor is always the
moral will and need, of which the mechanical
change is but the concomitant expression. So it
was that he regarded the whole social question
from the point of view of education in its widest
sense as indeed a part of the larger question of a
true national education. All determinist theories
of society, in whatever dress they appeared
scientific or religious were utterly repugnant to
him. The society was a sum, or, more accurately,
a fellowship, of living wills, and the character of
the fellowship must, in the last resort, be deter-
mined by the character of the individuals. He
believed, also, of course, that it was the privilege
and the duty of the more morally developed
elements of the fellowship to affect the less de-
veloped units. That, indeed, in the full measure of
its possibility, was the scope and the definition of
a true education. And he had a firm, unflinching
faith in the educability of his fellow-men, just as
he had a consistent sense of the duty laid upon
the more favoured to exhaust every means of
educating the less. Among these means he
EARLY LIFE 19
placed the highest value, in every sphere of
service, upon personal influence. It is character-
istic of him that, while absorbed in the duties of
his principalship at the Training College, he
found time to be an almoner to the Society for
the Relief of Distress, and no doubt thought it
not the least important part of his educational
work.
It was part of his conception of life as service
that he was always ready to efface himself when-
ever there was question only of his personal
claims. In all matters of public concern indeed,
wherever he was acting as a public servant he
was capable of a self-assertion which was proof
against all considerations of private friendship.
Rather, such self-assertion was habitual with him.
No one was ever more scrupulously just in all
his decisions on public affairs entrusted to him.
He was often consulted by public men as to the
choice of fit candidates for positions in the educa-
tional world, both at home and in the colonies.
But no trace of favouritism ever intruded into
any selection he made. He could bring the full
measure of an absolutely impartial judgment to
bear upon all such decisions. Some of his friends
may occasionally have thought him almost pedan-
tically conscientious when they found that he was
not to be influenced in their favour. But he had
22
20 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the gift of making even those who thought they
were suffering from his excessive sense of justice
feel its reality. At any rate, he went his way in
all such matters with a gentle directness which
nothing could turn to the right hand or to the
left. It was for the same reason that he disliked
giving testimonials. He feared lest, in the con-
ventional politeness which usually stud such
documents, he might seem to say too much or
hint too little.
But if those who knew him felt a firmness
in all such dealings of his, which began by irri-
tating and usually ended by convincing them of
its justice, they knew also that in his habitual
estimate of himself there was a quite undue
modesty. There was indeed in him none of that
self-depreciation which is only another form of
vanity. But there was a quite sincere modesty
about the interest to others of his private doings
and feelings. He never, for instance, could be
induced to keep a diary, and his letters, though
always marked by an old-fashioned politeness,
were strictly confined to the matter in hand.
He exhausted all his feeling in work and service
of every kind, and he would perhaps have been a
little ashamed if he had left any of it over for
the purposes of mere expression. He regarded
the keeping of a diary as an unnecessary and
EARLY LIFE 21
dangerous tribute to the vanity of a sentimental
revel in one's intimate moods of feeling. In his
view, all such things ought to be too sacred to
one's self, and to others too unimportant, to need
chronicling. It was a grave defect in him from
the point of view of a biographer.
CHAPTER II
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS
IT was in the year 1863 that Joshua Fitch's
long connection with the Borough Road Training
College came to an end. Lord Granville, who
was then President of the Council, had heard
of Mr. Fitch, it was said through Mr. Matthew
Arnold, at that time himself an inspector of
schools. There was a dramatic fitness about the
fact that Joshua Fitch thus owed his advance-
ment into the wider sphere of influence upon the
fortunes of English education to the great writer
whose genius he so highly appreciated. Matthew
Arnold himself probably never did a better service
to the cause of English education than in thus
calling attention to the work of the man who was
afterwards to appraise so justly his own educa-
tional work. Lord Granville paid a visit to the
Borough Road, was much impressed by the teach-
ing power of the Principal and the inspiring
influence which he exercised over his students,
and soon after offered him the post of Inspector
22
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 23
of Schools. Mr. Fitch accepted the offer, and in
the same year removed to York to undertake his
new duties.
With a view to appreciate more correctly the
nature and scope of the opportunities which
thus opened out before one of the master-
builders of the existing edifice of English educa-
tion, it may be well here to take a cursory
glance at the state of education in England
at that time. It is seldom, amid the con-
tending claims of contemporary interests, that
we are able to determine with exactness the
characteristic work of our own times. But suc-
ceeding generations will probably remember the
latter half of the nineteenth century as the
period of organized national education. In many
European countries, indeed, notably in Prussia
and in Scotland that work had long since been
undertaken and carried through to a certain
degree of completeness. But in some of the
leading countries of Europe in France and in
England, for instance the middle of the nine-
teenth century still found the provision for popular
education formless and inadequate, while the
close of the century in both countries saw the
lines of a complete national system laid down
and considerable results already achieved. Only
the ease with which we grow accustomed to
changes the most momentous, and the very
24 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
natural anxiety for still greater results where
expectation has been keenly aroused, prevent
us from seeing that since 1870 England has
experienced a quiet social revolution.
Yet it is true that in these days of State and
local control of education we ought all of us to
see, even if we do not, the beneficent changes
that are being wrought under our eyes, and if
not by our own exertions, at least with our own
assent. But for nearly forty years before 1870
the educational revolution of that year was being
quietly and secretly prepared. The Act of 1870
would not have been possible if the hands of
the Legislature had not been forced by the long
and silent work of a Government Department.
Nothing is more remarkable in the history of
the English nation, accustomed to open popular
discussion and fierce Parliamentary conflicts over
every reform, than the quiet way in which its
educational revolution was effected. And the
thoroughness of the preparation for educational
change is all the more remarkable when we
remember that the subject was one on which
popular opinion was so hotly divided that it was
impossible to secure any decision upon it in the
Parliamentary arena. In this state of popular
ferment upon the question, one of those devices
of government which are still possible in a
democracy with an oligarchical past was happily
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 25
resorted to. The English Parliament will often
readily assent to a grant from the national purse
for the accomplishment of a work whose limits
and scope it shrinks from defining by statutory
Act. It was in this way that the English State
first interfered in the matter of national educa-
tion. In 1832 the first educational grant was
passed, and this grant, annually renewed, was
left to be administered by the Treasury till 1839.
In that year, by an Order in Council, a special
Committee of the Privy Council was formed to
administer the annual educational grant. Thus
an English Education Department came into
being, its existence, no doubt, hardly suspected
by the great mass of the nation, and tolerated by
those who were brought into official relation with
it principally because of its distributing power.
For thirty years, in face of an exceedingly sensitive
public opinion and of the most conflicting public
interests, it kept gradually extending its powers
with an infinite patience and tact. The relatively
ambitious programme with which the members of
the original Committee of Council set themselves
to their work had to be abandoned. The work of
the inspectors whom they appointed had perforce
to be confined to reporting in the most general
terms upon the state of education. It was not
yet possible to entrust them with the task of
testing it in detail, or of directing it into better
26 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
methods. But the bait of increasing grants at
last began to work, and already before the sixties
the masters of the principal portion of the educa-
tional machinery of the nation the National
Society and the British and Foreign Schools
Society were accepting more or less willingly
the new conditions of Government inspection
and control of the work in which they were
engaged.
In 1861 the publication by Mr. Lowe of the
Revised Code made still more stringent and
effective the control by the Government of the
work of education. For the future Government
aid to the work of the voluntary educational
societies was to depend not only upon the
suitability of the buildings, the qualification of
the teachers, and the school attendance of chil-
dren, but also upon the results of individual
examination of their work. The function of the
inspector had assumed a prerogative importance
in the work of the Education Department. The
sifting of educational results which fell to the lot
of this body of men was now so thorough and so
universal as to make it impossible longer to resist
the conclusion that the existing system was
entirely inadequate to national needs. It was
the working of the Revised Code over a period
of nearly ten years which demonstrated the
bankruptcy of the merely voluntary method, and
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 27
necessitated the legislation of 1870. The en-
largement of State control over the old system
to the utmost limit which was possible had only
succeeded in proving that no control could suffice
to make that system satisfactory.
It was just two years after the issue of the
Revised Code that Mr. Fitch was appointed an
Inspector of Schools. The district entrusted to
his charge consisted of the county of York, with
the exception of certain portions of the north and
west. In his first General Report to the Depart-
ment, Fitch, with his usual sense of the importance
to any work of an accurate estimate of the social
circumstances which determined it, thus describes
the field in which he had been set to labour : ' The
district is populous and curiously diversified.
There is no county in England which exhibits
social and industrial life under such varied con-
ditions as are to be seen in Yorkshire. It is at
once the seat of several thriving manufactures
and the home of a large agricultural population.
It contains maritime ports, watering-places, and
teeming mines of coal and iron. There are in one
part of it large towns and villages of recent
growth, filled with evidences of modern energy and
science ; and in another, solemn ecclesiastical cities
and sleepy market towns.' It was with perfect
justice, therefore, that he was able to add : ' In
this district I have had the advantage of observing
28 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the operation of your Lordships' measures from
several very different points of view.' No one
had ever a more generous or less pedantic view of
his special work than Fitch. He had the power
of throwing into it all the largest and most un-
selfish hopes, purposes, ambitions which corre-
sponded to his own exalted view of life. The
whole spiritual content of the man was run into
it lavishly as into a mould, which was adequate,
or must be made adequate, to the reception of
this rich deposit. It was the prime secret of his
value to the cause of English education. The
man was never cramped by the procrustean
limitations of the work. The work was always
enlarged to the full spiritual proportions of the
man.
And with this power of complete self-expendi-
ture there went the most judicious perception of
the nature of a true educational ideal. He had
the very rare gift of perceiving what had to be
done in detail and in gross with equal clearness
and justice. He saw the needs of national educa-
tion as a whole, and yet he saw equally the
special needs and opportunity of each locality and
of each social group. He could appraise at their
right value and with a sure instinct of their
natural limits the importance of a common State
direction and of local and voluntary effort. His
career was a kind of mediation, sometimes con-
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 29
scious and strenuous, often only unconscious and
temperamental, between these two factors of a
successful system. It might be more true to say
that it was a sustained endeavour to adapt the
one to the other. He was probably entirely in
accord with Matthew Arnold when he advocated
a larger measure of State action in England in
the matter of education, and equally in accord
with him when he claimed that in England there
was little danger of that action being able to
evade a due measure of popular control. But
more, probably, than Arnold he saw the possi-
bility and the consequent duty of gradually
educating and using to the full the local interest
in and responsibility for the work of education
which is undoubtedly felt in this country ; and
he had the requisite patience and the requisite
sympathy and knowledge of detail to labour for
the reconciliation of the conflicting views by
which this local interest is always hampered, and
has been sometimes nullified, among us.
It was this largeness of view, combined with the
intellectual humility which enabled him to throw
himself completely into the detailed requirements
of the work in hand, that made Fitch from the
first an ideal inspector, and opened up to him
afterwards so many and great opportunities of
influencing education in England as a whole.
But it would be impossible to indicate more aptly
30 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the ideal with which Fitch set himself to his new
work than in words which he himself has used to
describe the nature and opportunities of the
inspector's calling.
* Every official post in the world has in it
possibilities which are not easily visible to the
outside critic, and which cannot be measured by
the merely technical requirements laid down by
authority. And this is true in a very special
sense of such an office as Inspector of Schools,
when the holder of the office likes and enjoys his
work, and seeks ampliare jurisdictionem, and to
turn to the most beneficial use the means at his
command and the authority which his office gives.
His first duty, of course, is to verify the con-
ditions on which public aid is offered to schools,
and to assure the Department that the nation is
obtaining a good equivalent for its outlay. But
this is not the whole. He is called upon to visit
from day to day schools of very different types, to
observe carefully the merits and demerits of each,
to recognise with impartiality very various forms
of good work, to place himself in sympathy with
teachers and their difficulties, to convey to each
of them kindly suggestions as to methods of
discipline and instruction he has observed else-
where, and to leave behind him at every school
he inspects some stimulus to improvement, some
useful counsel to managers, and some encourage-
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 31
merit to teachers and children to do their best.
There are few posts in the public service which
offer larger scope for the beneficial exercise of
intellectual and moral power, or which bring the
holder into personal and influential relations with
a larger number of people. It will be an un-
fortunate day for the Civil Service if ever the
time comes when an office of this kind is regarded
as one of inferior rank, or is thought unworthy of
men of high scholarship and intellectual gifts.
To hundreds of schools in remote and apathetic
districts the annual visit of an experienced public
officer, conversant with educational work, and
charged with the duty of ascertaining how far
the ideal formed at headquarters and under the
authority of Parliament has been fulfilled, is an
event of no small importance. And it matters
much to the civilization of the whole district
whether this duty is entrusted to pedants and
detectives who confine their attention to the
routine of examination, or to men whose own
attainments command respect, and who are quali-
fied by insight, enthusiasm, and breadth of sym-
pathy to advise local authorities, and to form a
just judgment both of the work of a school and of
the spirit in which the work is done. He whose
own thoughts and tastes move habitually on the
higher plane is the best qualified to see in true
perspective the business of the lower plane, and
32 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
to recognise the real meaning and value of the
humblest detail.'*
Truly Fitch knew how to exalt his office. He
exalted it by thirty years of intelligent and
strenuous labour, and it is the experience gained
in this labour which speaks in the words I have
just quoted. His ideal of the inspector's duty
here set forth was the result of a long service felt,
as it were, in perspective, but it was already his,
at least in its general outline, when he first set
himself to his work. That work consisted in the
inspection and examination of the British and
other Protestant schools not connected with the
Church of England which were to be found in his
district. In those days the denominational line
in matters of education was so clearly drawn that
there was a different inspectorial staff for the
Church schools and for the schools belonging to
other denominations. The division dated from
the first appointment of Government Inspectors
by the newly-created Education Department in
1840. In that year what came to be known as
the Concordat with the Church was established,
by which the sanction of the Primate was required
in the appointment of inspectors for Church
schools. In the same way the right of veto over
the appointment of the lay inspectors assigned to
its schools was granted to the British and Foreign
* * Thomas and Matthew Arnold,' p. 168.
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 33
Schools Society. The arrangement tended to
foster all the disadvantages of the traditional
system, or, rather, want of system. But it was
forced upon the Government by the existing state
of affairs. The schools of the nation had, in
almost all cases, been founded by religious bodies
with a distinctly religious purpose, and so long as
the testing of religious instruction was one of the
foremost duties of the inspector, it is impossible
to see how any other method could have been
imposed or accepted. We are apt to forget that
it was originally a universal condition of the pay-
ment of a Government grant that, in every school
which received it, the reading of the Bible at least
should be a part of the regular instruction. By
the time, however, that Fitch was appointed it
was no longer part of the lay inspector's duty
to test the religious instruction in non- Church
schools. The original necessity which had im-
posed upon the Government the appointment of
a twofold inspectorate was already beginning to
relax, and the disadvantages inherent in it were
daily becoming more manifest. Fitch, while
loyally accepting the conditions of his task, did
not fail to record his sense of the inconveniences
of the system. In his last report on the schools
of his northern district, drawn up on the eve of
the Act of 1870, he pointed out its disastrous
effect upon the attitude of the teachers in the
3
34 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
different kinds of schools towards one another,
and therefore upon educational efficiency. Speak-
ing with his usual enthusiasm of the educational
value of teachers' associations, he expresses his
regret that these associations are condemned to
assume a sectional character, and proceeds to
assign the reasons :
' The value of such meetings/ he says, * is
greatly diminished by the fact that the associa-
tion is sectional, and only includes a small part of
the elementary teachers of the district. I have
long felt, and often expressed, the desire that the
teachers of the Church of England schools should
unite with others to form strong local associations
for mutual help in the duties of their profession.
When it is considered that their training, their
duties, and their interests are absolutely identical
with those of other certificated teachers, except
in regard to the single subject of the Church Cate-
chism, it is much to be desired that this should
be done. Hitherto, however, the formation of a
united association has proved impracticable,
chiefly, as I am informed, because the masters of
Church schools fear that in joining it they would
offend the clergy and school managers. Another
reason has also influenced them. The present
system of sectional inspection undoubtedly tends
to keep the various classes of teachers apart.
When a Church schoolmaster finds that his school
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 35
is visited by a special officer, and is compared, not
with the neighbouring schools, but with other
Church schools at a distance, he is naturally led
to think that the Government has some motive
for regarding him as one of a separate class. It
is no part of my duty to discuss the propriety of
regulations which have long been sanctioned,
doubtless for important reasons, by your Lord-
ships. But I may be permitted to refer to the
actual working of denominational inspection as it
is visible here. The Nonconformist is irritated
by an arrangement which brings the whole power
and prestige of a Government officer to bear on
the inculcation of Anglican theology, and gives
no corresponding help to religious teaching of any
other kind. The politician is struck with the
inconvenience of a system which forbids any one
of those officers to take cognizance of the needs of
a district, or of its educational provision as a
whole. The economist wonders at its extrava-
gance. But it is the inspector of schools who
knows best how much of his time and strength it
wastes, how powerless it makes him to institute a
fair comparison between two rival schools, and to
bring them into friendly relations, and, above all,
how it alienates the teachers, and prevents the
growth of a proper esprit de corps, or of useful
professional associations in the various districts.'
But Fitch could speak his mind about the
32
36 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
defects of a system with all the more authority
that he was willing to work it, and was working
it, with the desire and the power to extract from
it the full measure of its usefulness. The three
reports upon his work in the Yorkshire district
which he submitted to the Lords of the Council
form in themselves a complete account of the
condition of education under the old system, and
a judicious estimate of its possibilities, and, at the
same time, point with conclusive force, alike by
their reserve and their insistence, the necessity of
change. There is not a single element of hope
which is not placed in bold relief and wisely en-
couraged. Throughout there runs the note of
anxiety a confident anxiety to turn to more
fruitful account every factor of an existing situa-
tion. They are of the highest value as documents
upon the state of education in England a genera-
tion ago. But they are of especial value for our
present purpose, because they reveal the character
of their author where it was always most fully
expressed in his work. And they are not only
worth reading, but they can be read with ease
and even pleasure, for Fitch had the literary
instinct. Whatever he wrote, he wrote with a
certain distinction. He had only to treat the
most commonplace subject, and it ceased to be
commonplace. Style is not merely an original
aesthetic instinct in the use of language : it is
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 37
also a moral product, the result of a rigorous
discipline. And this element in Fitch's style is
particularly noticeable. He used language as a
sacred trust, and this conscientious respect for it
had given him a perfect adequacy and correctness
of expression. Most men who think clearly write
well ; but with Fitch there was added a something
of grace and ease which gave all he wrote a liter-
ary flavour. It is hardly the quality which one
expects in an official report, but it did not desert
Fitch even there. What is usually wanting in
such documents is the gradation of tone, the
delicate sense of touch upon the instrument which
indicates without effort the degrees of value in
judgment or criticism. Fitch knew how, by a
quiet humour, to hint effectually where the limits
of his right of official interference would have
made a serious and detailed criticism seem pon-
derous and clumsy, and would have deprived it,
besides, of all chance of effect. How pleasantly,
for instance, he handled the ineptitude of those
teachers and managers who thought to meet the
suggestions of the Revised Code as to the need of
greater consideration of the capacities of children
by introducing a set of silly and pointless reading-
books ! ' I hope,' he says, ' teachers will find that
there is a golden mean equally remote from
Goody Two Shoes and from those appalling
essays on the graminivorous quadrupeds and the
38 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
monocotyledonous plants, which have so long
bewildered the little readers of the Irish books/
Or, again, he would report with a quizzical air of
resignation the kind of success which had attended
his efforts to increase the voluntary subscriptions
to the work of the schools. One wonders what
the managers of the school at Mosley thought of
the following appreciation of their ingenious at-
tempt to meet their Inspector's suggestions, if
they ever read his report. * I had remarked last
year on the absence of subscriptions, or of any
evidence of local interest ; and this year I found,
under the head " Voluntary Contributions," the
sum of 35 4s., balanced, however, by a new item
on the other side, in which the rent of the room
was also set down as 35 4s. It was explained
to me that the managers had thought it better to
credit themselves with this contribution to the
school, although the transaction was wholly
imaginary, no money having been given or re-
ceived.'
But the chief value of Fitch's reports is that
they exhibit in clear and bold relief his view of
education, and his appreciation of the means
which could be counted on for procuring it for
the nation. These features recur continually
from the first report on his Yorkshire district to
the last which, more than twenty years later, he
published from his experience in East Lambeth,
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 39
and in themselves suggest an adequate view of
the aims which had directed his work during all
those years. Every work of art consists of the
repetition and various elaboration of some leit-
motif. The consistent direction of a life's energy
is such a work of art, and nothing in its record
satisfies us so much as the perpetual discovery,
under different forms, of its guiding ideas. In
Fitch's case there is no difficulty in discovering
them. He was always preaching the doctrine
that it is the purpose of a true education to make
men, and its test that it has made them. How-
ever trite or hackneyed this may appear as the
mere statement of an ideal, it was to Fitch the
object of all his practical labour, the end to which
he sought to accommodate all the means at the
disposal of an English educator. He continually
insisted on the distinction which must be made,
and which ought always to be present to the
mind of a good teacher, between the attainment
of this true education and success in satisfying
the standards fixed by the State for testing the
educational instrument. He never wearied of
reminding the teacher that the State could do no
more than encourage the provision of the neces-
sary machinery and test its due working, but that
with himself lay its skilful adaptation to vital
ends. Above all, he sought to impress upon him
that, though there was a greater and less degree
40 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
of perfection in mechanical means, any means-
even the most primitive might be turned to
fruitful account by the man who kept in view the
true end of education, and no means, however
perfect, could be of real avail to the man who
lost sight of that end, or had never seen it at all.
We do not need, he would say, ' a multiplication
of subjects so much as the more skilful treatment
of such subjects as we have, more concentration
of force, a clearer perception of the difference
between the training which has a visible and
immediate bearing on the means of getting a
living and that training which looks further
ahead and seeks to show the scholar how to live.'
And he put his ideal in the most concrete form
that it was possible to give it. ' In all places of
education alike,' he said to the members of the
Teachers' Guild at Birmingham in 1895, 'from
the humblest ragged school to the University, we
need to keep in mind that character is no less
important than knowledge ; that the habit of
veracity and the love of truth for its own sake
are more valuable treasures to a man than any
number of truths formulated and accepted on
authority ; and that any scheme of education
which does not enlist the sympathies of the
learner, and encourage in him spontaneous effort
and aspiration, is self-condemned and doomed to
failure. Our teaching is naught if it does not
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 41
open out in the learner's soul new windows
through which the light of heaven and of truth
may enter in, and out of which he may look with
clearer vision on the richness of the world, whether
of nature or of books/
It was to such a conception of the work which
the teacher was called upon to accomplish that
Fitch sought to give effect in his own work as
inspector. In all sorts of ways he aimed at im-
pressing upon teachers that what he was looking
for in their schools was the amount of individual
intelligence which had been evoked in them, that
his sole test of the successful teaching of any
subject was the extent to which it could be shown
to have awakened the intellectual curiosity and
widened the intellectual interests of the children.
No amount of trouble seemed to him wasted if
only he could urge home this truth with a little
more certainty. The devices which he adopted
to secure it were of the simplest. He always, for
instance, laid special stress upon the reading of a
school as the subject which most surely tested its
general intelligence. We find him reporting from
East Lambeth in 1882: * Since I have had the
advantage of additional help I have felt freer to
make occasional changes in the division of our
duties, and I have, among other things, often
taken the reading examination of the higher
classes into my own hands. Here, I have sup-
42 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
posed, is to be found the crown and final resultant
of all the intellectual influences which are at work
in the school. If the children have been taught
to think, to feel, and to enjoy, as well as to know,
it is in the reading of the highest class that such
culture will reveal itself.' Inspection of this kind
must have been a bracing discipline in schools
where a mechanical uniformity of ' knowledge '
might very well have become the ideal of the
teacher. It forced the teacher to feel that it was
not sufficient for him to be the capable slave of a
routine system, that it was, on the contrary,
necessary for him, by the individuality and
thoroughness of his own intelligence, to be the
competent master of the means which that sys-
tem placed at his disposal.
In the same way it was natural that Fitch
should attach the greatest importance to the
religious teaching of the children. Here again
he cared little for the mechanical means which
might be employed teaching of dogmatic formu-
laries, directly moral teaching, or the like. Living
in the midst of excited public controversies, he
sat loose to the opinions of zealots on either side,
not through contemptuous indifference to their
arguments, not from any temptation to seek
feeble compromises, but exactly because he saw
so clearly the determining factor in the question
at issue. Here again here more than anywhere
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 43
else he saw the fundamental importance of the
living instrument. With any and every equip-
ment of mere means, the teacher of high charac-
ter and religious feeling would impress upon his
pupils something of his own sense of the meaning
and value of life. With whatever means, the
teacher who did not possess these qualities must
fail in this particular, the highest, part of his
task. He saw, indeed, clearly enough the value,
to the end of producing such teachers, of the
original connection of the English elementary
school with the different religious societies of the
nation. It was a natural consequence of the
closeness of that connection that, for the most
part, the national teachers were men of sincere
and earnest religious feeling. And, after 1870,
there is more than one hint in Fitch's reports
that he was sensible of a certain loss in this regard
under the new order of things. Yet it was not
the abandonment of the teaching of some form of
confessional creed or catechism that he regretted.
It was the possibility that a certain atmosphere
might be lost to the schools which, under the
old system, had been their outstanding merit.
Although, even before 1870, he was precluded by
his official instructions from examining the religious
teaching of the schools entrusted to his inspection,
he did not fail to report on what he could observe
of the religious element in their life as especially
44 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
worthy of the consideration of the Department.
Here, for instance, is a tribute to the Wesleyan
schools of his Yorkshire district which is well
worth quoting :
' And if the Wesleyan Methodists continue to
gain, as they unquestionably have gained, in-
creased local religious influence by means of their
day-schools, it ought to be remembered that they
have gained it rather by the care they have taken
in selecting religious teachers, by the close identi-
fication of school, chapel, and Sunday-school, by
hymns and simple acts of worship, by frequent
social and religious meetings, and by a sort of
atmosphere of Methodism with which the thought-
ful boy finds himself encompassed, than by any
formal dogmatic teaching, by any restraint on the
liberty of the parent, or by any of those usages
against which a conscience clause is designed to
guard. It is too commonly assumed by public
speakers and writers who know little of the
interior of a school that every place of primary
instruction must either be distinctly sectarian, and
teach a special creed, or be absolutely secular and
non-religious ; but I take leave to testify that the
schools which fall under my inspection are neither
the one nor the other. They are, almost without
exception, essentially Christian schools, in which
the Scriptures are read and accepted as the rule
of life, but in which no attempt is made to dogma-
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 45
tize or to fix the conviction of young children on
those points on which Christian people differ from
each other.'
The ' Methodist atmosphere ' had been achieved
by the ' care taken in selecting religious teachers.'
It was Fitch's opinion that no sectional religious
atmosphere, and, above all, no simply religious
atmosphere, could be gained in any other way.
The conditions of the appointment of teachers
have, of course, wholly changed since the day on
which Fitch wrote these words, but on this point
probably most people will agree with him still.
In his anxiety to procure a genuine education
for the children, Fitch always aimed at the
simplification and unity of their studies. Nothing
irritated him so much as the occasional tendency
of teachers, when the new Code had enlarged
the school curriculum, to treat each fresh subject
in its crude separateness from others, to use it as
a vehicle for so much isolated and portentous
' cram.' He did much to inspire even the best of
his teachers with the sense of a true method in
this regard, and to impart it to the worst. He
laid his finger unerringly on every instance of
pretence, of ambitious absurdity, of all kinds of
false and unreal knowledge, and gently but firmly
exposed it to the gaze of teachers, who were, for
the most part, willing to learn from him. He did
much in this way to bridge the gap between the
46 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
poverty of the children's conversational vocabu-
lary and the, for them, unmeaning wealth of
literary language, and thus to mediate between
their ideas and the ideas which they found in
books. It was an aim which he always kept
before him, and in which he laboured to make the
teacher share. He found this crudity of concep-
tion on the part of the child and the crudity of
instruction which ministered to it pervading even
those subjects which had been most carefully
selected with a view to the peculiar social needs
of the children. He reports, for instance, on the
teaching of domestic economy in East Lambeth.
1 There is a little pathos and a slight soupgon of
absurdity in the written answers of poor little
girls who come from the dingy and squalid alleys
of Lock's Fields, and who tell me in their papers
that a dwelling-house should be built on rising
ground, with a southern aspect, and on a sandy
soil/
It was equally in the interests of the simple,
straightforward ideal of a sound education that,
though himself a reformer both by native instinct
and deliberate purpose, he resisted the whole
army of educational ' cranks,' of those who urged
their pet specific for the cure of all educational
ills. No one was more ready than he to try or
to see tried every suggestion which contained the
promise of improvement in method or of a more
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 47
complete success in the general aim of education.
But he had continually to be on the watch
against the dangers and absurdities threatened
by the indiscriminating zeal of this class of
persons, so numerous in the field of education.
He had to reprove, for instance, the waste of
time and the mere mechanical futility which often
attended the unintelligent application of the
Kindergarten method. He found that a method
intended to develop intelligence along natural
lines was often used in such a way as to cramp
intelligence or to dam it up artificially. Or,
again, he had to remind those who advocated
in season and out of season (usually the latter)
the necessity of coming down to the children's
level that there was a still greater danger in
eliminating the necessary stimulus of intellectual
toil ; that every intellectual gain that was real
must be a conquest, and endure all the trouble-
some but heartening incidents of victory ; that
the teacher, in short, must always keep a little in
advance of the child's intelligence, or he will not
be able to teach at all. And, most of all, he
fought with all the weapons of his clear intelli-
gence and gentle humour the devotees of physical
training when they went so far as to claim that
the children were subjected to undue pressure
in the school, and that one-half the existing
school-day was all that a child could endure
48 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
without injury to health. His reply to the whole
army of ' half-timers ' was effective as coming
from such an experience as his : ' The school-life
appears to me whether I judge of it on the day
of inspection or on chance visits to be wholly
free from burdensome or unwholesome restraint.
Sanitary enthusiasts are sometimes found claim-
ing that one half the school- day should be given
to learning and the other to physical exercises.
They assume that children are never being physi-
cally trained unless somebody is training them ;
and they take no account of the hours which the
schoolboy already has for play, or of the ample use
which, under the kindly but unconscious teaching
of Nature, he makes of his opportunities.'
Fitch was certainly neither blind to the value of
the objects aimed at by the enthusiastic specialist
nor ungrateful for the reforms which were often due
to his efforts. But he desired to find room for such
reforms in a great and growing system which had
to take account of the total human capacity, and
accommodate itself to peculiar social needs and
conditions. It was his consistent aim in the
matter of education to remind his countrymen
of what laws and regulations could do what
were the natural limits of their operation, and on
what vital condition their fruitful activity de-
pended. He had realized the full force of those
words of Burke, which he was fond of quoting :
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 49
' Nations are not primarily ruled by laws. What-
ever original energy may be supposed either in
force or regulation, the operation of both is, in
truth, merely instrumental.'
Such, then, was the ideal of education which
Fitch had formed for himself, and to which in all
his official and unofficial activity he sought to give
effect. But almost as important an element in his
success was his clear view of the nature of the
means by which in England it had to be turned
into practice. He once happily described ' the
real forces on which the growth of the national
intelligence must mainly depend ' as ' the quick-
ened conscience and higher aims of local authori-
ties ; the desire of successive generations of
parents to secure for their children training a
little better than they have themselves received ;
and the steady increase in the number, already
large, of teachers not only possessed of technical
qualifications, but mentally cultivated, fond of
their work, and filled with aspiration and
enthusiasm.'
The cardinal importance to the cause of educa-
tion which he attached to the character of the
teacher has already become apparent. But the
attention which he paid to the subject demands
for it a measure of special reference, however
brief. He never failed to acknowledge with
all the generosity of his nature the devotion
4
50 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
and skill of the teachers as a class, but he was
also unsparing in his efforts to expose such
detailed weakness in their methods as he occa-
sionally met with, and to point out the more
general conditions on which their complete suc-
cess must depend. As an additional example of
the kind of failure which he too often found
attending the mechanical teaching of certain
subjects some have already been given the
specific subject introduced by the New Code
under the somewhat ambitious title of ' English
Literature ' may be cited. Here was a subject
which was so entirely after his own heart as a
means of evoking taste and intelligence among
the children that his disappointment at the actual
results was no doubt the more bitter in proportion
to the hopes which he had formed from its adop-
tion as an optional part of the school work. He
found the actual use which was made of it so
unintelligent that he roundly denounced it as, in
his opinion, ' one of the most unfruitful parts of
the school work.' What particularly annoyed
him in such cases was the appearance of the
choice of a subject by the teachers, not for its
intrinsic value as a means of education, but
because it was one on which the Government
grant might be most easily secured. With such
assumptions, wherever he found them operant,
he was not afraid to deal remorselessly. ' I fear
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 51
this illusion ' (the impression that English Litera-
ture was the easiest subject on which to secure
a grant) ' has been rather rudely dispelled in my
district by the pitiless way in which I have
rejected scores of children who, though knowing
the passage well by heart, showed, by their
want of expression or by their unsatisfactory
answers to questions, that they knew nothing of
the meaning of what they had learned.'
It was thus that the most considerate of in-
spectors would, in the interests of the teachers
themselves and of their work, deal with every
instance of intellectual indolence which he found.
He aimed at making teachers feel that initiative
was a prime element in intelligence ; that they could
not shirk the responsibility of individual choice
and cultivation of methods without forfeiting
their chances of efficiency ; that they were likely
to give a real education to their children exactly
by means of those subjects which they had made
the instrument of their own special cultivation.
He delighted to take favourable notice in his
reports of every instance where a teacher with a
special intellectual interest had by its means
created an atmosphere of general intelligence
throughout the whole work of his school. And
in later years, when the enlarged scope of educa-
tion in the country had succeeded in raising the
mere academic standard of qualification for
42
52 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
teachers, he continually touched with regret
upon the danger of a concurrent shrinking of
real culture among them. The ripe wisdom of
the criticism contained in the following quotation
and its appropriateness even after twenty years
may excuse its length :
' Among the younger generation of school-
masters and assistants I find a good deal of
professional ambition and a keener interest in
what may be called educational politics. There
is also considerable zeal about the grade of their
certificates and about obtaining from South Ken-
sington special certificates for drawing and science.
A small, though increasing, number of the more
ambitious is also to be found reading for the
degrees of the University of London. But much
of this mental activity is directed merely to the
passing of examinations, and when the status so
desired is once secured, the young teacher is too
apt to consider his professional equipment com-
plete. Of serious and systematic reading, of the
pursuit of any branch of letters or science for its
own sake, or of that habit of self-culture which
alone can preserve the freshness of mind needed
by the true teacher, I do not, I regret to say,
find increasing evidence. It is my habit to invite
assistants, especially those whose work I have not
often tested before, to conduct a class and give
questions in my presence ; and though there is
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 53
often much technical skill in the art of teaching,
one cannot help being struck also with the poverty
of illustration and with the narrowness of the
range both of thought and of reading from which
additional light is brought to bear on the explana-
tion of a lesson or a text-book. I fear it must be
honestly confessed that the very remarkable de-
velopment of primary education of late years has
not been accompanied by a corresponding im-
provement in the personal qualifications of the
teachers. It is one of the saddest results of any
reform of official machinery and regulations that
it tends to diminish the apparent necessity for
independent and spontaneous exertion on the
part of the workers. As the legal requirements
approach more nearly to a high ideal they become
more easily accepted as final and sufficient, and
many teachers who are capable of better things
are found fastening their whole attention on the
best means of complying with this or that regula-
tion of the Code and of securing the maximum
grant. After watching with keen interest for
many years the work of public education, I may
be permitted to express my conviction that the
one thing required to give full effect to the re-
forms which are devised from time to time with
so much thought and care by your Lordships is a
stronger sense on the part of the younger teachers
of the need for personal cultivation.'
54 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
It was, no doubt, disheartening to Fitch, whose
hopes for education were always so closely associ-
ated with the formation of a body of teachers of
fresh and eager intellectual interests, to find that
of the younger generation of teachers who were
being formed under conditions more favourable to
professional ambition and self-respect, and who were
admittedly qualifying themselves with eagerness
for a higher standard of technical fitness, it was
impossible to record a higher judgment in the
matter of the one thing necessary than he had
passed fifteen years earlier on an older generation.
In 1867 he had said : ' I confess it is disheartening
to me to find how few of the teachers seem to be
taking any pains with their own mental cultiva-
tion. They have more leisure than most persons,
and they often tell me what the occupations of
their leisure are. Among those occupations it is
extremely rare to find that the steadfast pursuit
of any kind of knowledge takes a place. There
seems to me very little of that love of literature,
that hunger after self-improvement, or even that
choice of a pet pursuit which would go so far to
redeem a schoolmaster's life from intellectual dull-
ness, to enlarge the range of his illustrations, and
to penetrate his teaching with force and life.'
But it may be confidently asserted that this
criticism, so transparently honest and sympathetic
at the same time, directed to the sole end of
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 55
educational improvement, and yet adjusted to a
clear perception of the opportunities and tempta-
tions of the teacher's calling, had its effect. No
single influence, perhaps, has told so surely as
Fitch's in raising the standard of professional
responsibility among the elementary teachers of
England in this generation. He gained that in-
fluence in the first instance by his patient and
disinterested insistence upon an ideal of pro-
fessional duty among those teachers with whom
his own official work brought him into personal
contact. In the end it extended, by his growing
authority with the public, over the whole field of
English elementary education.
But among the factors of educational improve-
ment Fitch never failed to rate at its due worth,
and to stimulate by every means in his power
into greater activity, the interest of the parents.
This is a factor which those to whom the direction
of national education is entrusted often seem to
overlook, though no doubt the oversight is more
apparent than real. The truth is that the interest
of the parents of a considerable section of the
children who are taught in our elementary schools
is so slight that it has to be disregarded. Bather,
it would be still more true to say that their want
of interest is often so negative a factor that it
has to be controlled and overridden. Hence the
present tendency to call upon the State to super-
56 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
sede the parent altogether, and to deprive him
of a responsibility which he seems inclined to
reject, or at least not anxious adequately to fulfil.
But Fitch was very far indeed from accepting any
such easy solution of the difficulty. To him the
function of the State was that of a collective con-
science educating and stimulating the individual
conscience. It was to set the measure of the
common duty, so that the most careless member
of the commonalty might not be merely compelled
to discharge that duty, but encouraged to make
it his own. He never tired, therefore, of pointing
the legitimate influence of parents and encourag-
ing its exercise. Here, as in all practical questions,
there was need of the justest discrimination, and
it was in these matters of nice discrimination that
his wise and patient judgment had scope. He
had, for instance, constantly to condemn any truck-
ling to the foolish and capricious interference of
parents on the part either of teachers or managers.
It was a danger which had especially to be
guarded against under the working of the old
system. That Fitch appreciated this danger to
the full is very evident from a section of his
report for the year 1867. He is speaking of the
unnecessary and hurtful competition of the small
schools which each religious denomination thought
well to establish side by side in small Yorkshire
villages.
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 57
* Parents,' he says, ' will patronize each school
in turn, not on educational or religious grounds,
but whenever an unreasonable request is denied,
or when there is any wish to flatter the managers
of one school at the expense of the others. This
is not a hopeful prospect. In an ideally perfect
state the parent would feel it a high duty to give
education to his child, and a special privilege to
have a good school within reach ; he would be in
no danger of supposing that the Government or
the richer classes had any reasons of their own
for inducing his children to go to one good school
rather than another. At present the absence of
a due sense of responsibility on the part of the
English labouring man, and our inability to
impart it to him, must be reckoned as part of the
price we pay for the denominational system, and
for the voluntary efforts of the religious bodies by
whom primary schools are conducted/
It was on this account that Fitch advocated, as
long as it was possible, the payment of school
fees by the parents. He regarded it as the
normal pledge of their prerogative interest in the
education of their own children, as the normal
sacrifice which that interest involved. Even
when imperative general reasons led at last to
the abolition of their general payment, and to the
establishment of a practically gratuitous system
of elementary education, he was still not a little
58 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
anxious about the possible results on the all-
important point of the parents' sense of immediate
responsibility. His strong desire had been to
retain that responsibility, as one which could not
be delegated, in the very forefront of the factors
contributing to educational elasticity and vigour ;
and he feared that the result of merging the
particular parent in the mass of mere ratepayers,
especially in a country like ours, where the parent
is only indirectly a ratepayer, and is therefore
not reminded of any immediate contribution to-
wards the cost of education, might be prejudicial
to the healthy and unselfish interest of the
parents in their children's education. No doubt
his views were much modified by the experience
of unsatisfactoriness and inadequacy which had
attended the old system, but his root feeling
about the matter probably did not change since
he wrote in 1869 : f It would be a misfortune if
the payments of the parents were to be given up.
That portion of the school revenue which is fur-
nished from this source is very cheerfully paid ;
it is most equitably assessed, for it falls upon the
parent in exactly the proportion in which he
derives advantage from the schools ; and it
fluctuates, as the income of every school ought to
fluctuate, in regular harmony with its popularity
and usefulness. And even if there should prove
to be high political reasons for surrendering this
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 59
income altogether, and for rendering primary
education universally gratuitous, the only parents
who would be relieved of their payments would
probably be the first to regret it, for payments
represent influence ; and while I am keenly
sensible of the evil of a preponderating influence
on the part of ill- instructed parents, and have
seen many sad instances of its lowering and
vulgarizing effects on the schools, I may venture
to remind the working classes that there is a
perfectly legitimate deference due from a teacher
to the wishes of the parents, and that this might
be put in peril or sacrificed altogether if the
whole duty of finding the money and of direct-
ing its expenditure were relegated to the rate-
payers.'
Of the service to education of local interest and
enthusiasm Fitch always took the very highest
account. In England education had for long
depended almost entirely on the operation of
this single factor ; and though by itself it had
not unnaturally proved unequal to the task of
creating an adequate national system, the hope
of State intervention lay rather in the direction
of extending the usefulness of its efforts and co-
ordinating their results, than in superseding them.
This was a doctrine which Fitch consistently
preached and sought to enforce by the whole
weight of his official action and influence. There
60 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
is no need to insist on the importance of this
factor, and Fitch's high estimate of its value has
been recorded in every report he wrote and in
almost every one of his numerous writings on the
subject of education. His gratitude to the great
voluntary societies which had for so long borne
the national burden in this regard, and especially
to the national Church, was unstinted and sincere.
To no element of our educational tradition did he
attach greater importance than to the enthusiasm,
freedom, and variety which the cultivation of this
habit of local service had secured and could still
further secure. His great hope from the Act of
1870 was that it had helped to extend this service,
and might be used to intensify it.
To State action Fitch looked for the wise
direction and co-ordination of these various factors.
That was its peculiar province. Its object must
be to set a minimum standard of education below
which no school receiving State aid must be
allowed to fall ; to stimulate and encourage by its
action the variety and enthusiasm of local en-
deavour ; to form a duly qualified body of teachers
drawn into ever closer and more intelligent co-
operation with its educational ideals ; and by every
possible means to foster the interest of parents in
the education of their children. Where the opera-
tion of State influence might seem for a moment
to supersede or depress the natural action of any
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 61
one of these factors, some attempt must be made
to recover it. If, for instance, there was a
tendency on the part of ill-instructed parents to
think that the teaching of their children had been
taken out of their hands, that they were relieved
of a burdensome responsibility, it was a tendency
which must somehow be checked in the national
interest. It was one of the many lessons which
Fitch, with his open mind, was ready to draw
from alien experience that the danger of such a
tendency need only be temporary, and was, indeed,
likely to be temporary only. In his memorandum
on the working of the free -school system in
France he happily draws the conclusion of experi-
ence in that country, and insinuates the hope
which it suggested for his own : * It is rare for a
parent in any rank of life to be content to see his
children brought up more ignorant than himself ;
and when in any country a system has existed
long enough to produce one instructed generation
of parents, legal compulsion, except in a few cases,
becomes unnecessary/ To the increasing action
of the State in matters of education Fitch, like
his great fellow-worker Matthew Arnold, turned
with confidence and hope. In England, at least,
with its native bent of character and its rooted
tradition, there was little danger of that action
becoming excessive or prejudicial to the forces
which it was its privilege to convert into a sound
62 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
national economy. Besides, as with his sane
political instinct he saw very clearly, the character
and meaning of State action had in our times
undergone an unconscious but thorough trans-
formation. In some words addressed to the
Teachers' Guild at Birmingham in 1895 Fitch
put the whole matter with unmistakable clear-
ness :
t There are those who distrust all action of
Government in regard to the intellectual life of
the nation ; who rely wholly on local and personal
effort, rather than on the machinery and influence
of the State, and who are disposed to think that
the one thing needful for the completion of our
social reforms is a society for letting people alone.
On the other hand, there are those who reflect
that the experiment of letting things alone has
now been tried for a long time with rather dis-
couraging results ; that under democratic institu-
tions we can no longer regard the State as a
dominating and external force, but as the expres-
sion of the collective will, judgment, and conscience
of the nation ; and that what is effected by the
State is done neither for us nor against us, but
by ourselves, our own corporate resources being
employed for objects in which we have a corporate
and common interest. In regard to many subjects
of the highest public concernment which in older
days were left entirely to private and individual
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OP SCHOOLS 63
initiative in production, in the supply of some
of the necessaries and conveniences of life, in
commerce, in national defence, in the encourage-
ment of art we are beginning to find that the
great forces wielded by the State can be made to
enrich and bless the community, and that these
forces ought to be utilized. And those who think
that there is still room for the further develop-
ment of the principle of national association in
the sphere of education are increasing in number,
and are ready to inquire how and within what
limitations governmental action may be ex-
tended and may be expected to result in national
benefit.'
Such, then, were the educational ideal and the
view of the available resources for giving effect to
it which consistently inspired the special work of
Fitch's life. Both were already clearly present to
his mind when he commenced his work as Inspector
of Schools in 1863. Throughout the great educa-
tional changes which filled the period of his public
career, and of which he was himself so great a
part, he wrought successfully to give effect to the
one and to utilize the other. Nowhere, not even
in the large public counsels to which he was so
often called, did he work so hard or so effectually
for these ends as in the ordinary official duties of
his life as inspector. There he felt that he was
in touch with the beating heart of the machine.
64 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
He found in what might be so easily the dreary
grind of a humdrum official routine the oppor-
tunity of a great public, indeed of a great human,
service. For he never forgot that the service
of the public was a ministry to human souls, a
deepening and purifying of the life -sources of
humanity. It is not strange to find the uniform
note of his career struck once again in the last
official words which, as inspector, he ever addressed
to the Lords of the Council, and to find, too, that
he concludes his labours with the hopeful thought
of the vast work which it yet remains for the
future to accomplish.
' Much yet remains to be done. Considered
either as a science or as a fine art, education is at
present in an early stage of development. Better
methods than have ever been adopted yet wait
to be devised, new truths to be enunciated and
proved, and new channels of access to the under-
standing, the conscience, the character, and the
sympathies of children to be discovered. The
future is full of promise, but if that promise is
not to be disappointed, it must be fulfilled, not
merely by removing the responsibility from one
authority to another, but rather by the right
co-ordination of all the agencies imperial, local,
religious, academical, and scientific which in a
free country like ours are concerned with the
intellectual amelioration of the people.'
HIS WORK AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS 65
There it all is again, in the end as at the begin-
ning the thing to be achieved and the conditions
of achieving it. And there, too, is the spirit of
the true workman, forgetting his ' little done ' in
the vision of the * undone vast ' which it is for the
hands of the future to shape.
CHAPTER III
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES
MR. FITCH'S official career as Inspector of Schools
was interrupted once and again by the special
duties entrusted to him by the Education Depart-
ment. During his stay at York he was thus
employed by Lord Taunton's Schools Inquiry
Commission of 1865 to examine into and report
on the condition of the endowed and proprietary
schools in the West Riding of Yorkshire and in
the City and Ainsty of York. This he supple-
mented by a further inquiry into the state of
certain endowed schools in the North and East
Riding and in Durham. Again in 1869 he was
appointed by Mr. W. E. Forster one of the two
special Commissioners to whom was assigned the
duty of reporting on the condition of elementary
education in the four great cities of Manchester,
Birmingham, Liverpool, and Leeds. This work
was intended to strengthen Mr. Forster's hands
as Vice-President of the Council in preparing the
Education Act of 1870. But that same year was
66
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 67
productive of further legislation destined once
more to enlist Mr. Fitch's services in a special
field. The Endowed Schools Act of that year
was intended to do for secondary education some-
thing of what the Elementary Education Act had
more completely and systematically projected for
the education of the working classes. Mr. Fitch
was relieved for a time of his duties as Inspector
of Schools, and was appointed an Assistant Com-
missioner to give effect to that Act. For seven
years he was engaged in the discharge of this
important duty, and it was not till 1877 that he
again returned to his ordinary official duties as
Inspector of the Metropolitan district of East
Lambeth. In 1883 he was appointed one of the
new Chief Inspectors whom the Department had
chosen to superintend and direct the work of the
ordinary inspectors of the various districts. In
this capacity he had entrusted to him what was
known as the Eastern Division of England, com-
prising all the eastern counties from Lincoln to
Essex. Two years later he succeeded Canon
Warburton as Inspector of Training Colleges for
Women in England and Wales, and this duty
he continued to fulfil until his final retirement
from the service of the Education Office in
1894.
The Department had wisely adopted the excep-
tional course of asking Mr. Fitch to continue his
52
68 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
services for a further period of five years beyond
the usual retiring age of sixty-five, which he had
reached in 1889. Even then a memorial, signed by
representatives of every women's training college,
was forwarded to the Education Department pray-
ing for his further continuance in office, but the
necessary rigour of public regulations made it
impossible that this request should be complied
with. Fitch himself freely recognised the justice
and necessity of giving impartial effect to these
regulations, though his mind still remained so
youthful, and the love of his special work was
still so strong in him, that the compulsory abandon-
ment of duties to which he had so long grown
accustomed must at first have been a painful
wrench. His friend Mr. Francis Storr reports
his comment upon a necessity which he admitted
to be sound and just. It aptly marks the un-
avoidable want of discrimination incident to the
application of official regulations. ' I have just
been staying/ said Dr. Fitch, f with a Bishop ' (it
was Dr. Durnford of Chichester), * still vigorous
both in mind and body, and able to take his full
share of work. Yet he was appointed to his see
at exactly the same age at which I am compelled
to retire, and has held it now twenty years.' But
Mr. Storr hastens to add in defence of the rule,
with a humour whose edge had no doubt been
sharpened by a ripe knowledge of the conditions
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 69
of public office : c It is certain that if the public
service occasionally cuts short the ripe wisdom
and mellow experience of a Dr. Fitch, it rids
itself by a process of painless extinction of endless
Old Men of the Sea/
Among Fitch's other official or semi-official
labours must be mentioned his visit to America
in 1888, and the report on American education
which he prepared as a result of that visit, and
which was presented to Parliament and afterwards
published under the title of ' Notes on American
Schools and Training Colleges.' He also prepared
a similar report on the working of the Free School
System in America (United States and Canada),
France, and Belgium. This inquiry had been
undertaken at the request of the Education
Department with a view to the legislation pro-
jected in 1891, and was also ordered to be printed
and presented to Parliament.
It would be impossible to attempt an adequate
review of the labour, so rich and varied, which
Fitch thus devoted to the interests of educational
improvement in this country. Yet without some
such attempt the record of his life would be but
a maimed and halting enumeration of disjointed
and unrelated activities. Of one of Fitch's reports
that which he drafted as a member of the
Schools Inquiry Commission Mr. Francis Storr
has well said : * A more graphic picture of what
70 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
English middle-class education was in the sixties
could not be found, or, I may add, a more telling
argument against the school of Mr. Herbert
Spencer. Dr. Fitch's experience of the Sleepy
Hollows of Yorkshire furnished him with a fund
of anecdote and illustration of how things ought
not to be done which he used to good purpose in
his subsequent lectures and articles.' The same
might be said, with the necessary modification in
view of the special reference of each, of every
report, and, indeed, of every article ever written
by Fitch on the subject of education. But the
special interest of the work which comes under
our notice in the present chapter is that, as it
took him outside the rigid limits imposed by his
ordinary official duties, so it reveals the ease and
certainty with which he moved in every part of
the educational field, and appropriated his experi-
ence of each to an ever-enlarging view of the
needs of the whole.
Fitch's report for the Schools Inquiry Com-
mission is certainly a living document. It is riot
only an interesting and luminous page in the
history of English education, but also a revelation
throughout of the character of its author in all its
varied strength, fairness, and intellectual supple-
ness. Fitch had an eye which always saw every-
thing that was essential, because he so clearly
realized what was essential to any inquiry which
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 71
he might have in hand, and knew so instinctively
where to look for it. He had a judgment which
never failed to take proportionate and just account
of the ideal to be aimed at, and of the actual con-
ditions which, in a particular case, defined the
possibility of its attainment. He had the courage
which never shirked the clear statement of facts,
however unpleasant to individuals, and the con-
siderateness which sought to recommend the justice
of such statement even to those whom it con-
demned. All these qualities are conspicuously
revealed in this document. It is an almost
perfect example of the just relation of general
principles to individual circumstances. Too often,
in the hands of the clumsy or obstinate investiga-
tor, general principles seem to press with a kind
of antecedent weight upon the special circum-
stances of the case so as to force them out of the
picture. Here there is nothing of this pedantic
tendency. The conclusion grows out of the
justice and breadth of the general picture. Prin-
ciples do not clumsily impose themselves upon
facts, but seem, on the contrary, to detach them-
selves with an impressive force and majesty from
the degree of success or of failure, of strength or
of weakness, which the facts disclose.
The object of the Schools Inquiry Commission
of 1865 was to examine into and report upon the
manner in which the ancient educational endow-
72 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
ments of the nation were then fulfilling their
purpose, and thereby to provide a trustworthy
account of the condition of secondary or middle-
class education in England at that time. There
existed already, in the report of the patient Com-
mission which, during almost twenty years (1818-
1837), had examined into the condition of English
endowed charities, an immense mass of accurate
information as to the origin, history, constitution,
and revenues of the endowed schools. But it had
not lain within the scope of that Commission to
report upon the character of the education which
those schools supplied. The Commission of 1862,
presided over by Lord Clarendon, was entrusted
with the duty of furnishing such a report for nine
of the great public schools. To Lord Taunton's
Commission a similar duty was assigned for the
remainder of the endowed schools of the country.
It was found that there were in all about 3,000
such endowments, of which 782 were grammar
schools, or schools specially intended by their
founders for the teaching of Latin and Greek,
while the rest were charity schools, intended to
furnish a non- classical or elementary education
only. As we have seen, the specimen district
assigned to Mr. Fitch was a part of Yorkshire
with which his work as Inspector had already
made him well acquainted. This district con-
tained a very large number of these ancient
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 73
foundations. It was possible to decipher the
general history of educational endowments from
their typical fortunes in this single corner of
England. That Fitch interpreted aright the
reasons of past failure and indicated the true
line of reform is evident from the fact that his
own report contains in itself every finding and
every recommendation of the Commission's general
report.
It was about the middle of the last century
that the old educational endowments of this
country had reached the nadir of possible useful-
ness. Their futility would have been grotesque
if it had not been a national tragedy. What
England needs, and needed still more in the
sixties of the nineteenth century, was an organ-
ized and adequate system of middle-class educa-
tion, accommodated to modern social and intellec-
tual conditions. A beginning, at least, of such
provision might have been made by an intelligent
use of these endowments of the past. But the
dead hand weighed heavily upon them, crushing
out, in most cases, the last remains of their vital
energy. As long as any trace of the old social
conditions under which these schools had been
founded remained, it was still possible to extract
from them some measure of public usefulness.
But Fitch saw clearly enough that those condi-
tions had totally disappeared, that the growth of
74 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
wealth and the consequent fluidity of social
status, which had been the chief results of indus-
trial development, had accentuated even the most
trifling differences of social rank, and had so
rendered chimerical the hope of giving a satisfac-
tory education in the same school to all classes
of a single local community. Yet exactly this
was the original purpose of the old foundations.
Under the changed conditions a new aim had
become necessary if the resources inherited from
the past were not to be utterly wasted. And
this aim was not only necessary, but was also
easily possible of attainment. The Parliamentary
grant had already rendered superfluous the use of
the endowments for the education of the working
classes, and the imposition of local rates for the
same purpose was soon to render it still more un-
necessary. The increase of wealth and the improved
means of travel had, in the same way, carried off
the sons of the larger land-owning class and of
the rich manufacturers to distant schools which
attracted by the prestige .of their great tradition.
It was evident, therefore, that an attempt should
be made to preserve and adapt the ancient founda-
tions to the needs of the children of the middle
classes in each local centre. In other words, they
would serve to create and foster a type of educa-
tion midway between the teaching given in the
elementary schools and that provided by the great
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 75
public schools in close connection with the Univer-
sities, a true secondary education adapted to
modern requirements. If this were to be done,
it would be necessary to loose the fetters which
kept the old endowments bound in an impotent
servitude. Nothing could be clearer or more
pointed than the general conclusions which Fitch
reached on the general question of the use of
endowments. More than twenty years later he
admirably summarized them in an address de-
livered before the College Association of the
University of Pennsylvania.
4 First, that the intellectual and social wants of
each age differ, and always must differ, from those
of its predecessors, and that no human foresight
can possibly estimate the nature and extent of
the difference. Next, that the value of a gift for
public purposes depends not on the bigness of the
sum given, but upon the wisdom of the regulation
and upon the elasticity of the conditions which
are attached to the gift ; and, finally, that every
institution which is to maintain its vitality and
to render the highest service to successive genera-
tions of living men should be governed by the
living, and not by the dead/
The evidence of the failure of these ancient
endowments was most impressively marshalled in
Fitch's report ; but it was marshalled throughout
with a view to exposing the causes of the failure.
76 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
At a first glance the report reads like an indict-
ment. On a closer view it becomes the most
sufficient of explanations. It is a sociological
study of organic decay. Every fact is disclosed
in its vital relations. Nowhere has the traditional
English habit of ignoring the need of progressively
organized method, of trusting entirely to indi-
vidual force and initiative, been more mercilessly,
because so dispassionately, exposed. Fitch was,
perhaps quite unconsciously, one of the most
intelligent pioneer workers in the field of sociology.
At least, for students of that still embryonic
science, this report is a lesson in both the method
and the spirit of inquiry. Believer as he was in
the supreme importance of the living agent, he
saw, nevertheless, that in all social affairs the
conditions were living also, and that the amount
and quality of life in the one were determined by
the amount and quality of life in the other. If
the education provided by the old endowed schools
had in large measure ceased to have any value, it
was first of all because the conditions under which
it was offered had ceased to correspond with the
circumstances of actual life, and then because this
lifelessness of traditional conditions had paralyzed
the teaching power.
It was under these two heads that Fitch ex-
posed the failure of the schools. Dealing with a
phase of social life, his clear mind seized at once
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 77
and always kept to the front the guiding principle
of a continuous social life the progressive good
of the community. His common-sense instinct
taught him that the only way to give vital effect
to a law of the past is to avoid pedantic legalism,
to seek to establish under changed conditions
what ancient founders sought to establish under
the conditions of their own time. The benefactors
of the past had had but one object, the educational
advancement of their own little community. The
means which they had devised for the attainment
of that end were no doubt well adapted to procure
it. They had in most cases assigned the ad-
ministration of their bequest to a local body of
trustees, whose interests in the matter of educa-
tion might be supposed to represent adequately
the interests of the local community as a whole.
It was obviously, too, in the interests of the local
community as a whole that they had in most
cases devised sufficient lands for the free teaching
of Greek and Latin to all children in the parish
or district who might desire it. Yet it was
exactly these means, so carefully devised to give
effect to the feelings and needs of the community,
that had ended by ignoring both the one and the
other. From being men who by their superior
intelligence and public spirit were able to repre-
sent the common educational interests and needs
at their highest, the trustees had too often become
78 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
a mere local clique, jealously perpetuating its
ignorance and inefficiency by nomination from a
single uneducated class, and concealing both
behind the necessity of obedience to the letter of
the trust. In other cases the trustees might be
men entirely worthy of their position by indi-
vidual intelligence and general public spirit, but,
living at a distance, they were without that local
interest and knowledge which could alone have
rendered their administration effective.
Seldom, indeed, did it happen that these two
elements of a competent trust, local interest and
general intelligence, were to be found in combina-
tion. If the trustees were confined by the terms
of the foundation to the locality, they tended to
become representative of a single class, and that
the least intelligent and public-spirited. If, on
the contrary, they were drawn from a distance,
they hesitated to interfere under conditions which
they imperfectly understood. Besides, their
powers were in some cases confined to the manage-
ment of the trust property, even the nomination
of the schoolmaster being in other hands. In the
same way the provision made by the foundations
for the free education of a district had degenerated
under modern conditions into a system of compro-
mises and evasions which degraded the schools in
popular estimation. As Latin and Greek had
been specially mentioned as the subjects of in-
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 79
struct ion in most of the deeds of foundation, the
teaching of these subjects continued to be free ;
while for even the most elementary subjects of
an ordinary English education regular fees were
charged. But, as Latin and Greek were just the
subjects which in most of the schools no one
wished to learn, the intentions of the founder had
been in one of the most important particulars
completely negatived. But perhaps the gravest
defect of all was the all but absolute irresponsi-
bility of the schoolmaster. By the terms of most
of the trusts he enjoyed a freehold tenure of his
office on condition of his readiness to teach sub-
jects which in practice he was often never called
upon to teach. No more grotesque perversion,
perhaps, of past benefactions had ever been
witnessed; yet it was all a perfectly natural
result of the divorce of the letter of ancient docu-
ments from the spirit which had informed their
original intentions. The living social conscience
had abdicated in favour of the dead letter of the
instrument originally devised as an organ of its
expression.
The effect of this absurd pedantry of obedience
to the letter upon the character of the education
given in the schools was what might have been
expected. It was not only that in most of the
endowed schools Latin and Greek were no longer
taught at all, that they had sunk to the level of
80 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the elementary schools in their educational pro-
gramme, and far below it in educational efficiency.
Much more serious was the fact that, where the
classical languages were still taught, they had
altogether ceased to be a real educational instru-
ment, so lifeless and mechanical had the teaching
of them become. But Fitch went even further.
While admitting most fully and generously the
efficiency of a very small number of the grammar
schools on the lines which had been fixed by
their traditional connection with the Universities,
he boldly challenged the value of the contribution
which education on such lines could make to the
kind of secondary education needed in these days.
He felt that a system which subordinated the
educational interests of all the pupils of a school
to those of a proportion which in the best schools
did not exceed 20 per cent, was self- condemned.
The teaching of the junior pupils even in the best
schools was conducted on the assumption that
they would continue their course with a view to
preparation for the Universities. On this assump-
tion much that was merely mechanical in the
teaching of the junior classes was not only
pardonable, but almost unavoidable ; but it was
an assumption utterly unwarranted by the facts.
Hence Fitch contended that throughout the
grammar-school course an attempt ought to be
made to convert even the most elementary teaching
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 81
into an instrument of real intellectual culture. In
the lower classes all pupils alike ought to be taught
efficiently the subjects preparatory to the most
complete course of instruction which the school
aimed at affording. When in the higher classes
it became necessary to differentiate between
pupils whose intellectual preparation had different
objects in view, a considerable portion of the
school work ought still to be common to all, while
a part of the school time might be reserved for
the special lines of study which corresponded with
the broad lines of division incident to any com-
plete scheme of secondary education.
It was only in this way that the grammar schools
could become real secondary schools, ministering
in their special localities to a real national need.
They had failed to realize this purpose, both because
a pedantic and unintelligent adhesion to the letter
of their charters had blocked the way to gradual
and continuous reform, and because this tradition
had produced a class of teachers wedded to an
ancient educational method and ideal. One of
the most essential elements in any reform must
be an entire change in the character of the teach-
ing body. It was not enough to have teachers
who were mere scholars, and who were appointed
on the ground of their scholarship alone ; it was
necessary, above all, in the secondary school, as
in the elementary, or even more than in the
6
82 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
elementary, to have teachers with a large and
vigorous interest in the nature of education itself,
and with at least some training in method as a
contributory aid to such interest.
These were the broad conclusions to which
Fitch's inquiry had led him, conclusions as judi-
cious in their detailed content as they were
generous in spirit. By their adoption he looked
forward to a transformation of existing endow-
ments into at least the beginnings of a national
and universal system of secondary education in
England. It has been, perhaps, worth while to
dwell at some length on the document in which
these conclusions were enforced, because Fitch was
soon afterwards entrusted with the duty of turn-
ing them, so far as was possible, into fact. The
work which he had to do as an Assistant Com-
missioner under the Endowed Schools Act of 1870
must indeed have been often disappointing to him.
But it was at least work which he was peculiarly
fitted to perform, alike by his experience, by the
clearness and wisdom of his own educational aims,
and by his peculiar tact and skill in affairs. His
patience never failed him in presence of that local
conservatism, sometimes vigorous, sometimes in-
dolent, but always tenacious and obstinate, which
resisted the accomplishment of the work which he
had in hand. He knew how to extract the most
that was possible out of circumstances the most
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 83
adverse. With his generous ideal of what ought
to be done and his clear perception of the oppor-
tunities for doing it presented by the Endowed
Schools Act, he might well have been excused if
he had emerged from the ordeal of administering
that Act a reformer with crushed heart and broken
will. But instead he was grateful for what he
had been permitted to accomplish, and always
hopeful of the gradual accomplishment in the
future of all that still remained to be done. He
knew with a sympathy which was akin to admira-
tion the weaknesses of his countrymen, perceiving
with a true insight that in national as in indi-
vidual character weakness does not exist apart
from strength, that strength is always made
perfect in weakness. To him there was a pro-
found truth, not to be lightly overlooked or for-
gotten, in the verdict of traditional experience on
the English character ' slow, but sure.' He felt
that the Englishman could not be rudely forced
into any reform, however obvious to a wider intelli-
gence, but must learn for himself its necessity in
the school of experience. Yet there runs through
many of his references to his experience as an
Assistant Commissioner under the Endowed
Schools Act the note of disappointment with the
rejected opportunities which strewed the path of
the administration of that Act. Here, for instance,
is a reference which he interjected into one of his
62
84 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
inspectorial reports after his return to his old work
in London. It shows at once how much he could
have done for London education if the stupidity
of local conservatism had given his reforming
spirit room to work, and how much London lost
through lack of a social conscience which might
have yielded to the direction of one of its wisest
advisers in the matter of education.
1 There are resources enough in the educational
charities of London to surround the Metropolis
with a zone of such schools ' (secondary or middle
schools), * and it is well known to have been the
desire of the late Endowed Schools Commissioners
to effect this object. But at present it has been
very inadequately achieved. There is in my dis-
trict only one such school, the excellent Datchelor
School for Girls. Close, however, on the border
of the district at Hatcham, there are the two
great schools of the Aske foundation, which draw
many scholars from Peckham and its neighbour-
hood. The history of the foundation is instructive.
When, some seven years ago, it was my duty as
Assistant Commissioner to investigate its condi-
tion, I found that the trusts required the main-
tenance of a small alms-house for twenty decayed
members of the Haberdashers' Company and a
little charity school for twenty-five orphan children.
But the income had become enormously dispro-
portioned to these humble objects ; and, with the
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 85
intelligent and generous co-operation of the Haber-
dashers' Company, the Commissioners were able
to frame a scheme which, after providing amply
for the original purposes of the trust, created four
large middle schools in the north and south of
London, two for girls and two for boys, with
handsome modern buildings and equipments, with
moderate fees for those who paid, with special
provision for the gratuitous admission by merit of
scholars from the elementary schools, and with
upward exhibitions to enable the best scholars to
proceed to higher education elsewhere. All these
schools are now full and flourishing, and arc
greatly appreciated. But, for the complete or-
ganization of the secondary education of the
Metropolis, they should be multiplied at least
fivefold. They might easily be so multiplied if
the intentions of the Endowed Schools Act were
fully carried out. And if the London ratepayer
thinks it a grievance that the costly and beautiful
schools which the law has compelled him to pro-
vide for the poor are appropriated in part by the
children of those who could well afford to pay, he
may be reminded that a more cordial acceptance
on his part of the provisions of that Act would
long ere this have helped to solve the problem in
a much more satisfactory way. He has not yet
become fully convinced that since the passing of
the Elementary Education Act a charity school of
86 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the eighteenth-century type has become a mis-
chievous anachronism, and that, having regard
both to the altered requirements of modern times
and to the spirit of the founders' intentions, the
wisest use which can be made of many of the rich
educational endowments of London is to establish
good public intermediate schools. He will prob-
ably learn this lesson, as most of us learn some of
the best lessons of our lives, just a little too late.'
These words were written at the close of the
seven years' struggle to give effect to the great
purpose which his own high vision had given him
before the Government of his country entrusted
it to his hands. They are a representative record
of its success and its failure. It may be well
to place beside them other words spoken by him
at the beginning of the same enterprise. In
November, 1870, the elementary teachers of his
Yorkshire district presented Fitch with a farewell
address and testimonial. He had already been
for some months engaged upon his new work
as Endowed Schools Assistant Commissioner at
Exeter. To the Yorkshire teachers he brought the
report of the aims which were directing his new
work in that far south-western corner of England.
' Scattered all over the country there is an
immense number of schools professing to give an
education in Latin and Greek, and such an educa-
tion as will prepare the pupils for the Universities.
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 87
These schools are enormously in excess of the
demand, and the consequence is that they are
doing very little or none of the work for which
they are designed. I won't say that is quite the
fault of the schools. Many of them are trying
very honourably, but unsuccessfully, to fit the
work of the nineteenth century into schemes
designed for the sixteenth century. Now, the
policy of the Commissioners is to select certain
schools which, from their history, their tradition,
their wealth, and their present condition, are
adapted to become first-grade or University
schools. These will be few in number, but the
object will be to make them strong and efficient.
The other schools must not attempt to rival them,
and therefore the Commissioners desire that all
the rest of the endowed schools should deliberately
accept their position as modern institutions adapted
to give a good, generous education to English
boys who are not going to the Universities. In
that way all the endowed schools of England will
have to be reorganized, and there will be besides
these University schools two distinct grades
the second and third grades. The second-grade
schools will take those boys who will remain till
they are sixteen or seventeen years of age, and
who want a good, sensible scientific education up
to that age, and the third grade of schools will be
between them and the ordinary primary schools.
88 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
They will take scholars who are going to leave
school at fourteen or fifteen years of age, and will
give an education adapted to the necessities of
that very large class just above the children
attending the ordinary primary schools.'
The general purpose of the Commission could not
have been more clearly expressed, and that purpose
had no more intelligent, energetic, and tactful
instrument than Joshua Fitch. Shortly after his
death one who then worked with him for the first
time, and who was then drawn to him by a sym-
pathy of ideas and a community of aim which
continued and increased till the end the late
Lord Hobhouse thus wrote of him : ' My estimate
of him was founded on numberless details of busi-
ness in which we were for some time concerned
together. I came to know that he had clear and
sound ideas of what school education should be,
great skill in applying them to varieties of cir-
cumstance, and patient industry in making his
views acceptable to others. That estimate re-
mains clear and strong as ever/
It is work of this kind, fateful as it always is
in the development of a nation's real life, that is apt
to pass unnoticed in the records of its history. It
is just possible to indicate generally the principles
which controlled such work, and crudely to record
the rough measure of its success. The living
souls which energized within its mass, and which
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 89
gave it its real form and value, only too easily
escape our rough handling. Yet Fitch's bio-
graphy, and the biography of such men as he, are
hidden in the living movements which such work
bequeaths. History takes account of the work as
a whole : with the passing years it loses sight of,
even if it had ever interest or sympathy enough
to see at all, the clear intelligence, the patient,
plodding will, without which that work could
never have been. Yet here and there a memory
from the sixties and seventies of the last century
still retains the picture of Fitch's buoyant spirit
and observant eye in the midst of the work
which was so peculiarly his own. To the Rev.
R. D. Swallow, Headmaster of Chigwell Grammar
School, we are indebted for such a momentary
finger - touch upon the ' human pulse of the
machine':
' I made acquaintance with Sir Joshua Fitch
nearly forty years ago, when I was a boy at the
head of an old grammar school in Yorkshire
Heath School, in Halifax. He visited the
school for purposes of inspection, on behalf of the
Endowed Schools Commission, in the autumn of
1865. Now, inspectors in those days were strange
and formidable personages, and I was, naturally,
nervous and timid in conversation with him, for
he talked to me for half an hour, at least, in his
care to discover the work the school was doing in
90 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the place. But his pleasant manner and kindly
sympathy soon placed me at my ease, and I have
since discovered that he picked the brains of my-
self and my schoolfellows to good purpose, though
we were unconscious that we were making history.
I recall, as if it were yesterday, his skilful hand-
ling of us in the lesson for the day, which he took
out of our head-master's hands. It was a transla-
tion from the "De Corona" of Demosthenes, and
here again nervousness vanished under his helpful
encouragement. Side by side with me then was
a scholar whose career has been of some distinc-
tion. We went together to Cambridge the
following year, and in 1870 he was Senior Classic.
When, a few years ago, he became Sir John
Bonser, and a member of the Privy Council, I
discussed his success with Sir Joshua, describing
the surprise we felt at the brilliant result of the
Tripos for even his closest friends had not ex-
pected him to win the foremost place in his year.
But I found that the young inspector had dis-
covered in him an ability which was almost
genius, if there is anything in the idea that one
mark of genius is an infinite capacity for taking
pains. I mention these things, for I can recall
in that visit to Halifax two characteristics of
the man which constantly impressed me in
later intercourse I mean his kindliness and his
thoroughness. Of his kindliness I have other
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 91
proofs. For painstaking and efficient thorough-
ness I venture to think that there was never
better work done than in his official survey of
Yorkshire schools. That Blue-Book is a /crfjiua ec
<m in English official life.'
It was characteristic of Fitch that acquaintances
formed in what would be for most men the lightly-
forgotten accidents of official life so often ripened
into lifelong friendships. In every situation with
which his official duties called upon him to deal
he not only at once detected the larger human
interests involved, but seemed to feel with an
immediate sympathy the interests of the indi-
viduals whom it affected. Men were drawn to
him, both by the sincerity of this personal interest
and by the impersonal standard which he had set
for his own judgment, and to which he knew so
well how to induce others to conform. Many a
firm and grateful friend of Fitch's dated his
friendship from some chance encounter of the
kind which Mr. Swallow has described. Even
the terrors of the examination-room were con-
verted by Fitch, when he examined for the Indian
Civil Service Commissioners, or for the University
of London, into an opportunity for detecting
character and making friends. The undeveloped
boy was to him an open book, almost as easy, and
often more fascinating, to read than the developed
man. He had, indeed, as the very essence of his
92 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
nature, that great hopefulness which detects pro-
mise at least as easily as it appraises performance.
But it was not only the young for whom he felt,
and of whose promise he was such a kindly and
earnest helper. Many of the closest friends of
his later life were men whom he first met during
his official work in Yorkshire or Birmingham, or,
later, as an Endowed Schools Assistant Com-
missioner.
The late Canon Ainger was a valued friend of
later years in London, whom he first knew as an
Assistant Master in one of the Yorkshire schools
which he visited. While engaged on the work of
the Commission at Taunton, and in other towns
of the south-west, he also renewed his acquaint-
ance, begun some years before at the Education
Office, with Dr. Temple, who had now become
Bishop of Exeter. The shrewd wisdom and the
massive earnestness of the great Archbishop
appealed to Fitch as much as the more liberal
theology, of which he was then esteemed to be a
representative and leader. While still at York
Fitch had also made the acquaintance of Mr.
Voysey, who was then Vicar of Healaugh.
Yoysey's frank and courageous character had
a great fascination for Fitch, but it is probable
that he was still more attracted by the intel-
lectual loneliness of the man. Himself the most
gentle and patient of reformers, he was also
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 9S
the most determined and unyielding, and he
felt a kind of kinship with the spirit of every
sincere and earnest protest against the authority
of mere uncritical tradition, even when he least
agreed with its substance. But there was room,
too, in his intensely receptive and sympathetic
nature for all that was genuine and vital in the
heritage bequeathed by the past. York, with its
ecclesiastical associations and atmosphere, laid its
spell upon him from the first. He loved the
Minster and its services, and was delighted when
the Dean, Dr. Duncombe, assigned him stalls in
the choir for the use of himself and his family. It
gave just that touch of spiritual domesticity to
worship in which an Englishman delights, and
which Fitch was Englishman enough to prize
with a hearty and childlike simplicity. Even the
somewhat airless social atmosphere of what is
called, by one of the happiest accidents of nomen-
clature, a cathedral close was not without its
elements of enjoyment for him. He had the
power of extracting all that there was of wider
and more intelligent interest in such a society,
and the gift of natural obtuseness to whatever
might be narrow and petty in it. Among the
friends whom he specially prized at York was the
late Mr. Corbet-Singleton, first warden of Kadley.
Fitch would always be found at St. Sampson's on
the Sunday evenings when the eloquent Irishman
94 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
preached there. Other friends of that time were
the Rev. Richard Elwyn, afterwards Master of
the Charterhouse, Dr. Monk, the organist of the
Minster, Dr. Vance Smith, afterwards one of the
Committee which produced the Revised Version of
the Bible, and Mr. Kenrick, who was soon to become
Professor of Hebrew at Manchester New College.
Among the men who worked with Fitch upon
the Endowed Schools Commission were many who
had already made their mark in the world of
scholarship or affairs or both, and who were
afterwards to attain to the very highest distinc-
tion. Thomas Hill Green was a Commissioner,
and so was Mr. D. R. Fearon, afterwards the
distinguished secretary to the Charity Commis-
sion. Fearon had already shared with Fitch the
duty of preparing the report on education in the
four towns which proved so useful to Mr. Forster
in the preparation of the Elementary Education
Act of 1870. Liverpool and Manchester were
reported on by Fearon, while Birmingham and
Leeds fell to Fitch's share. An interesting example
of the way in which Fitch would turn to the best
educational account every opportunity offered by
his official labours is given by the Rev. E. F. M.
M'Carthy, of Birmingham :
* The first occasion upon which Sir Joshua Fitch
(then Mr. Fitch) was brought into official contact
with Birmingham education was in the year 1869,
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 95
when he was entrusted by Mr. W. E. Forster, then
Vice-President of the Committee of Council on
Education, with the duty of making a report for
the information of the House of Commons on the
state of education in the boroughs of Birmingham
and Leeds, while Mr. D. R. Fearon was instructed
to do the same for Liverpool and Manchester.
Mr. Fitch's report was a very able and exhaustive
one, and furnished a complete picture of what was
then the condition of educational machinery, both
as regards quantity and quality of production, in
the town which was admittedly the most advanced
in the kingdom. His picture of the state of things
even there was sufficiently depressing to open the
eyes of Parliament to the immediate necessity of
legislation, and largely helped Mr. Forster to pass
the memorable Education Act of 1870.
' In the course of this inquiry Mr. Fitch put
himself in communication with Sir Josiah Mason,
who had founded an orphanage, and was contem-
plating the endowment of a college of University
rank, which has since developed into the University
of Birmingham. Mr. Fitch's experience in con-
nection with the Schools Inquiry Commission
(1865-1867) had made him thoroughly conversant
with the uses and abuses of educational endow-
ments in England, and his broad views of the
proved necessity of the continual revision of
founders' wishes made a great impression upon
96 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
Sir Josiah Mason, and confirmed him in his
opinion that the machinery by which a founder
would best achieve his aims should not be too
rigidly prescribed in his deed of foundation, but
that it should be subject to periodical revision by
the trustees. It was in this spirit that in the
following year, 1870, Sir Josiah Mason provided
in the deed of foundation of Mason Science College
that the provisions of the trust should be subject
to alteration or variation every fifteen years. Sub-
sequently (1886) Mr. Fitch gave evidence to the
same effect before a Committee of Inquiry of the
House of Commons into the working of the Charit-
able Trusts Acts and the Endowed Schools Acts.'
But of all Fitch's colleagues of that time there
was probably none for whom he came to entertain
a higher esteem and a greater admiration than
Mr. James Bryce. They were men peculiarly
fitted to understand and appreciate each other
both by the earnest public spirit characteristic of
each of them and by their common political creed
and conception of national well-being. It was
fitting that to Mr. Bryce should have fallen at
Fitch's death the duty of expressing in fitting
and graceful language the national recognition of
his services in Parliament. Here it may suffice
to insert some words in which Mr. Bryce has
recorded his impressions of his friend.
' It was in 1865 that I first came to know Sir
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 97
Joshua Fitch. He and I then were working as
Assistant Commissioners under the Schools Inquiry
Commission. There was a large staff of University
men employed in visiting and reporting on secondary
schools, and especially on the endowed schools ; ; and
among the Assistant Commissioners were D. R.
Fearon, afterwards Secretary of the Charity Com-
mission, and T. H. Green, afterwards Professor of
Moral Philosophy at Oxford. Mr. Fitch (as he
then was) knew far more about education than
any of the rest of us, except perhaps Mr. Fearon,
and I found his knowledge and his judgment
extremely helpful whenever I consulted him. He
possessed even in those early days a mastery of
the whole field of education such as few in our
time have reached. He knew the facts thoroughly,
and he studied them in a thoughtful, penetrating,
dispassionate way, with no apparent bias even on
the questions that were then the subjects of such
bitter controversy the Revised Code and the
Conscience Clause. From 1868 onwards when
the work of the Commission ended I ought to
say that he produced an admirable report on
secondary schools in the West Riding of York-
shire he and I met occasionally, but not very
often until in the latest part of his life he became
permanently established in London. His retire-
ment from the active work of a School Inspector
did not diminish his interest in educational prob-
7
98 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
lems. Few persons had grasped them so com-
pletely and exactly ; no one, I venture to think,
wrote on them with more authority. He had
acquired a complete familiarity with all the details
of the intricate and highly artificial system which
is administered by the Education Department.
He knew it not merely as an official in Whitehall
knows it, but as one who had seen and tested it
in its working, and had applied rational principles
to it in the spirit of a statesman. Having a high
ideal conception of what education might do for
the people, he approached the subject as a reformer,
a reformer at once zealous and temperate. When-
ever any new phase in the perpetually recurring
education problem appeared he was the first person
to whom many among us turned for counsel, and
we never turned in vain. No one was able to lay
his finger with so much certainty on the weak
point in any proposal or to indicate so clearly the
measures that were needed. No criticisms of
more value, perhaps none of equal value, appeared
in the press between 1896 and 1903 as those con-
tained in the letters which Sir Joshua addressed
to The Times. They were always moderate in
expression, but they were trenchant in substance
as well as lucid in expression, and the judgments
they delivered have been shown by what has
since occurred to have been sound. That he was
quite free from sectarian or party prejudice made
COMMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES 99
him an all the more valuable adviser to those who,
being themselves disposed to a particular view,
wished to know the weakness of their own case and
the strength of their opponent's. An unfeigned
love of truth, a constant public spirit, a sense of
what better and wider instruction may do for the
people these were the keynotes of his character
and action in the career to which his life was
devoted, and they seemed to me no less strong in
1903 than they had been nearly forty years before.
' In private he was an eminently genial and
kindly companion, tolerant in his views, lenient
in his judgments, freely and modestly giving from
his large store of experience. He had a wide
knowledge of literature and a discriminating taste.
No one appreciated more warmly and in a more
catholic spirit the work of others, nor did differences
of opinion affect his estimate, as his book " Great
Educators " conclusively showed a book, it may
be added, in which his lofty ideals of education
are clearly seen in their breadth and richness.
There was both in his talk and in his writing a
gentle persuasiveness and ripeness a sort of mitis
sapientia which was very attractive, and made it
always a pleasure to discuss a subject with him.
This equanimity and candour were characteristic
of the man, and belonged to the impression which
his personality made, with its modesty, its simple
dignity, its occupation with high aims and thought.'
72
CHAPTER IV
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS
As Mr. Fitch's conception of education was of the
most catholic and complete, so the zealous and
energetic temper of his intellect carried him into
every field of practical activity for giving effect
to it. If circumstances had associated him in a
special degree with the development of elementary
education, he was also able, as we have seen, to
render a signal service in the sphere of secondary
education. But even here neither his indirect
influence nor his direct action was to find a limit.
His mind had always been much occupied with
the aims and work of Universities and with the
fresh contribution which in our times they might
make, and therefore ought to make, to the intel-
lectual training of the nation. Among the educa-
tional dreams of the past, none more fascinated
his imagination than that of Bacon in the ' New
Atlantis.' He deliberately set before himself the
hope* of realizing that vision of a ' universitas ' of
learning under modern conditions. Here as else-
100
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 101
where he knew how to make the desirable wait
upon the possible. But all through the long
struggle for the transformation of the London
University he kept his ideal in view. It was his
sense that the old University had done much
towards the establishment of one aspect of a
sound University education that inspired him to
resist so tenaciously the adoption of hasty schemes
which might sacrifice what had been gained to
the praiseworthy desire of securing another aspect
of University work hitherto lacking. Fitch, indeed,
felt by instinct, and by reflection had deepened the
feeling, that every reform must be gained alike
by hard fighting and by skilful and alert general-
ship that it is of the nature of a campaign against
prejudice whether obstinately active or indolently
passive, against the incalculable force of the inertia
of socialized opinion. He distrusted the flighty
generalship which was ready in the midst of a
campaign to change the base of operations because
that which had been originally chosen had proved
less central and convenient for the purposes of the
campaign than had been hoped. He preferred
rather to be satisfied with progress, however slow,
from a position once fairly secured than to indulge
in the guerilla tactics more suited to the needs of
a combatant fighting for bare life than to those
of an imperial power organizing the permanent
conquest of an essential territory. Such certainly
102 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
was the spirit of his leadership in the struggle for
University extension and reform in which he played
so great a part.
Fitch's work in this field was determined by his
close connection with the University of London.
So far back as 1860, while still at the Normal
College in the Borough Road, he had been appointed
by the Senate Examiner in English Language and
History for a period of five years. From 1869 to
1874 he again held the same post. In 1875 he
was nominated by the Crown to a fellowship in
the University, and remained till his death a
member of the Senate. He was, besides, from an
early date a Life Governor of University College.
He was thus closely identified with the often
conflicting interests of those institutions to which
the higher education of London had been entrusted.
Yet he was perfectly clear as to the policy which
it was necessary to pursue in order to extend the
usefulness of the University without forfeiting the
gains which its actual development had secured.
That policy may be roughly described as the policy
of freedom of teaching.
Fitch's mind was quick to seize the lessons of
actual facts. Not only the history of his own
University, but the consistent tendency of the
later development of the older Universities as
well, taught him that the conditions of modern
life were steadily setting in favour of the utmost
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 103
liberty of teaching. Whatever else a University
might in our days set itself to do, it must first
of all recognise and appraise knowledge, however
acquired. If the old Universities, with their
tradition of centuries binding them obstinately
to the collegiate system, had been forced to relax
it and to recognise the necessity of assessing by
their Examining Boards the knowledge of non-
collegiate students, it seemed to Fitch a dangerous
instance of conservative pedantry that educational
institutions should in these days be seeking a
University charter on the terms of a rigorous
revival of the old system. It was not that he
was blind to the excellences of that system and
to the advantages which it could still legitimately
claim over other methods of acquiring knowledge.
Indeed, he would occasionally dwell with an affec-
tionate tenderness, as if he himself had been one
of their sons, upon even the most elusive influences
of the ancient English seats of learning, and claim
those influences as things not lightly to be appraised
in the sum of English education. Is it possible,
for instance, to conceive of a nobler and a more
liberal estimate of the worth of an Oxford or
Cambridge degree than this? 'It represents
residence for a certain period in the midst of
a learned society, encompassed by ancient tradi-
tions and ennobling memories. It symbolizes
leisure and repose, the companionship of youthful
104 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
students, access to ancient libraries, walks in trim
gardens and under the shadow of mediaeval build-
ings. It means, in short, that the holder of an
Oxford or Cambridge degree has, for a certain
time in his life, cut himself off from the world of
business and money -getting to breathe the air of
an academic community, and to partake of the
many nameless social and intellectual influences
which belong to an ancient seat of learning/
And liberal as the estimate is, it is perfectly
sincere. There was something in Fitch which was
intimately responsive to all the poetry of the past.
He could not contemplate for the youth of England
the possible loss of all that the city of the dream-
ing spires could itself teach them. But there were
other cities in England with spires that did not
dream, but rose gaunt and stubborn, crowned day
and night with the smoke of their own fierce
incessant labouring. And in those cities a great
part of the youth of England had to learn the
harsh, stern poetry of the present or not learn it
at all. To Fitch it seemed that the methods of
the past could not there be exclusively insisted
on. Even there he admitted that knowledge
might still best be acquired under the conditions
set by the collegiate system. But other methods
were not only possible, but necessary. And the
essential note of a true University system for
the modern world must be the frank recognition
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 105
of this diversity of method in the acquiring of
knowledge.
In an address upon the proposals for establish-
ing a new University in the North of England
which Fitch delivered before the Social Science
Congress in 1879 the address from which the
quotation given above is taken he made this
claim for the freedom of teaching with the utmost
definiteness, yet with an equal persuasiveness.
Owens College, Manchester, was then agitating
for a University charter which would enable it to
confer degrees upon those students only who had
pursued a definite course of collegiate training
under its own professors. Fitch reminded his
hearers of how retrograde such a step must be,
how it meant that the aim of the proposed
University would be more restricted than the
work which the College had already actually
accomplished. One of the most valuable experi-
ments which the local circumstances had induced
the College to make was its evening classes for
those students who, owing to their being already
pledged to a business career, were unable to
attend the ordinary day courses. If the proposed
charter were granted, none of these students,
however sufficient their knowledge, could present
themselves for a degree. The plea for a charter,
Fitch urged, would have been unanswerable if it
had been presented in this wise : ' We are planted
106 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
in the midst of an active-minded and enterprising
community, conscious of the need of intellectual
culture, and daily more and more disposed to look
to us to supply that need. We are making it
our business to understand and to encourage
the best aspirations of the great industrial com-
munity in the midst of which we are placed ; we
are sending out emissaries to neighbouring towns
to hold evening classes and give lectures ; we are
gathering together large numbers of the young
men in Manchester who are getting their living
all day, and who are pursuing regular courses of
study in the evening. We feel a strong interest
in the many struggling and ambitious students
in the North of England who are using public
libraries, who are attending courses of lectures,
and otherwise acquiring sound knowledge by the
best means within their reach. We think that,
if we were in a position to direct the studies of all
these people by a well-arranged curriculum and
scheme of examination, and to confer appropriate
distinctions on all who proved themselves to have
acquired a given amount of knowledge and mental
cultivation, our usefulness would be greatly ex-
tended. We could then not only co-ordinate and
direct, but also greatly ennoble, the best of the
scattered educational agencies which surround us ;
and for this purpose we ask that, in addition to
all the means of usefulness we already possess,
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 107
the power of granting degrees shall be conferred
on us.'
There is no surer way of contributing to the
solution of a difficult problem than by showing
what it really is. Fitch had the gift of clear and
courageous intelligence which gets behind all the
surface complexities by which a practical problem
baffles or escapes us to the simplicity of the
problem itself. It was by simplifying the Uni-
versity problem that he so effectively pointed the
way to its solution. He was able to see it as a
whole because he insisted on examining it from
within. He recalled those reformers who per-
sisted in skirmishing at some chance point on the
circumference to the central position which com-
manded the whole field. The purpose of a
University remained at all times the same. It
was to foster and extend sound learning to the
largest possible extent and by every means which
might be from time to time available. The
method or methods by which this purpose could
best be accomplished varied, and were bound to
vary, according to the circumstances of place and
time. In the Middle Ages learning could flourish
only in great centres provided with sufficient
libraries, and therefore attracting the best
teachers. In our days the conditions were com-
pletely altered. The best teaching might still be
offered in the ancient foundations, or even in
108 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
modern institutions founded on the same model.
But liberal learning could be acquired in many
other ways. A University could best achieve its
purpose by marking out courses of study to guide
students in their pursuit of knowledge, and then
by testing it, however acquired. This was, of
course, only the first and most obvious way in
which a modern University could attain its end.
It was its duty, besides, to keep in closest possible
touch with all institutions which provided the
highest teaching, to consult continually with
those who provided such teaching, to recognise
and co-ordinate the various instruments of educa-
tion, and to take action itself for extending the
usefulness or increasing the number of such
instruments.
This was the ideal of the work of a modern
University which Fitch advanced as a member of
the Senate of the University of London, and
enforced with all the power of his pen during the
long struggles of the nineties over the recon-
struction of that body. He was entirely in
sympathy with the desire for a teaching Uni-
versity in the first city of the English-speaking
world. He cherished as much as, perhaps more
than, any the alluring dream of Bacon and Stow
and Gresham and Cowley. He felt acutely the
national disgrace of a great capital like London
lagging behind Berlin and Paris in the organiza-
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 109
tion of its higher education, the more that all the
instruments of the best knowledge lay about
ready to hand, but in most admired confusion.
He was especially anxious that University and
King's Colleges should be brought more closely
within the circle of University life, and that their
teachers should have an intimate share in shaping
the work of the University and guiding its
counsels. But he was equally anxious that in
seeking to gain this object the University should
not imperil the particular kind of success which
it had already achieved. By the accidents of its
brief history it had revealed the educational needs
of the time, and measured aright its own special
capacity to meet them. Originally founded to
meet the special needs of London, it had been
forced by the mere effort to do its own work as
well as it could be done to become a national,
even an imperial, institution. It had been com-
pelled to confine itself to the task of setting a
standard of the kind and range of knowledge to
be acquired, and of awarding the value of that
which had been acquired. To do this it had had
to loosen its original close connection with the
London colleges ; but the boldness of the step
had been justified by a success which could not
possibly be disputed. Its influence upon higher
education had penetrated throughout the whole
British Empire, and its awards were an absolutely
110 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
trustworthy guarantee of the acquisition of a
high standard of knowledge in all its principal
departments. Fitch felt that this success must
not be tampered with or endangered for the sake
of any future developments, however important.
Yet he admitted fully that the work of the
University was incomplete so long as it stopped
here ; that it was essential that some means should
be found for incorporating the colleges more
closely in the life of the University; that the
University could become, and ought to become, a
centre of the best teaching for London, without
sacrificing the imperial functions which it had
come to discharge. By his frequent discussions
of the subject in the public forum of our leading
reviews, especially the Quarterly and the Nine-
teenth Century r , he did more probably than any
other single person to keep this twofold aspect
of a satisfactory solution to the front. By his
official labours on the Senate he did as much as
any to procure the actual solution which has
secured the practical recognition of both these
aims in the reconstituted University.
It might seem from what has been said that
Fitch was unduly enamoured of the examination
system, that he unduly depressed the importance
of fostering the great teaching corporations.
Both charges would be exactly the opposite of
the truth. Though he advocated the utmost
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 111
freedom of method in acquiring knowledge, or,
rather, insisted that such freedom had universally
become a fact which the modern University must
recognise, and though he held that the controlling
function of a modern University must be to
assess the worth of the knowledge acquired by all
comers, he contended none the less strongly that
the examining work of the University was worse
than useless, that it must be pernicious and retro-
grade, unless it complied with two conditions.
It must set the highest possible standard of
knowledge, and it must be free from the slightest
suspicion of partiality. It was because he feared
that the multiplication of Universities must in-
evitably lower in both these respects the standard
of value attached to their tests of knowledge that
he so stubbornly resisted that policy. He was
always pointing a warning finger to the example
of America. When the dark shadow of the
Gresham University scheme hung ominously over
the educational future of London, he fearlessly
prophesied the woes which its fulfilment would
bring upon us. He dragged into the light the
thinly - veiled promises of cheapened medical
degrees which that scheme had immediately in-
duced some of the leading men in the profession
to make, and forced the public eye to measure the
disastrous nature of the results to medical learn-
ing which must follow. In the same way he
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
signalled danger if the exclusive right of examin-
ing the students of the London colleges for
University degrees were to be reserved to their
own teachers. The public would have no
guarantee either of the strict impartiality or of
the high standard of knowledge required, which
were alike essential to the credit and the success
of a modern University. Nothing, in short, could
be a greater disservice, both to the cause of
education generally and to the public estimation
of Universities in particular, than an examination
system which could be legitimately suspected
either of partiality or of want of thoroughness.
On the question of the importance of fostering
great centres of teaching Fitch was equally decided.
Other methods of knowledge had grown up to
meet the variety of need of a complex society.
But the well-equipped college, with its staff of
learned teachers, each of them not only repre-
senting the best general culture of the time, but
devoted to some special branch of learning as the
business of his life, with its libraries, museums,
laboratories, with the incessant action of its
vigorous intellectual and social life this must
still remain the most perfect and universally
satisfactory instrument of education. Even the
best type of student must lose something by
missing the influence of such a society. Only
from such influence could the worst type hope to
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 115
gain anything which could be justly called educa-
tion. That such institutions should grow in
number and develop in teaching power must be
the desire and the aim of every educational
reformer. But Fitch held that the surest way to
fetter them in the fulfilment of their legitimate
duty and in the development of their special
qualities was to grant them a University charter.
Lampeter and Durham were his awful examples.
Their business was to teach, to learn how to teach
better, to draw within their educational net un-
touched classes of society, and then to leave the
assessment of the worth of their teaching to some
impartial and largely independent tribunal.
Here, again, of course, he did not insist upon
an impossible and, indeed, injurious independence.
He felt that both the University and the teaching
colleges must profit by close harmony of aim and
continual consultation between examining and
teaching bodies ; but none the less the principal
duty of a modern University was to measure
results, just as the principal duty of a modern
teaching college was to produce them. That
principle once frankly recognised on both sides
and distinctly provided for, there could not be too
close an intimacy in their relations or too close a
co-operation in their survey and occupation of the
field of work. It was the principle which, owing
largely to Fitch's clear advocacy of its necessity,
8
114 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
formed the basis of the compromise which gave
its present form and character to the University
of London.
But it was not only in large questions of Univer-
sity policy that Fitch's influence upon his Alma
Mater was felt. He gave himself wholly, with
his characteristic generosity of mind, to the
minutest details of University work which were
entrusted to him. He had been an excellent and
conscientious examiner, instinctively apt to take
just account alike of the vigorous requirements of
an examination standard and of the varieties of
human nature which presented themselves to be
tested by it. It was of course in vivd voce
examination that this opportunity of nice dis-
crimination was given him most liberally. And
he as liberally seized it. He had the power of
detecting easily and at once the moral abilities or
disabilities of an examinee, the shyness, mauvaise
honte, pretentiousness, self-possession, which usually
count one way or the other for so much in the
results of this kind of intellectual test. In the
hands of many an examiner it becomes a terrorizing
ordeal, and is worse than useless as a test of know-
ledge. Fitch regarded it as his supreme oppor-
tunity, and succeeded in making it such. He
quickly set the shy youth at his ease, and readily
drew out from him all he had to give. Just as
easily he unmasked pretentiousness and exposed
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 115
it, and discovered what of real knowledge lay
behind an easy and assured manner. It was his
sympathy with the student that inspired even his
application of the rigorous standard of a Univer-
sity test. He had always before him not the
exacting claims of an official standard to be blindly
wreaked upon a number of morally indifferent
subjects, but the moral fortunes of a human being
to be determined, so far as a single act could
determine them, by the application of an intelli-
gent justice. In all sorts of ways his thoughtful-
ness sought and found the hearts of those whom
he examined. In reading aloud for dictation, he
always remembered the acoustic defects of an
examination hall, the need of perfect distinctness
in enunciation, of careful and unhurried repeti-
tion. In a memorandum of later years on the
examinations of the University in English he
advises the abandonment of that curious subject
in an Intermediate University examination which
was described as ' writing out the substance of a
paragraph previously read by the examiner.' The
reasons he gave for his advice exemplify this
thoughtfulness of his. They are marked, too,
with a touch of that sly humour which used to
strike one as the gentlest of ruffles on the surface
of his punctilious politeness of manner. 'The
different dimensions and acoustic properties of
the rooms in which the examination is held, the
82
116 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
defective hearing of some of the candidates, and,
it must be owned, the imperfect elocution of some
of the examiners, combine to make this form of
test somewhat uncertain and unequal in its opera-
tion.' Such a hint of possible imperfection on the
part of examiners, as suspected by one of them-
selves, would have been a comfort in the days
when one had to bow before these deities throned
above the thunder. It may be a comfort to a
new generation to meet it now.
But perhaps the form of vivd voce examination
in which Fitch took most pleasure, and through
which he thought he was able to measure most
accurately both the intelligence and the know-
ledge of those whom he examined, was one which,
probably at his suggestion, had been adopted by
the Home and Indian Civil Service Commissioners.
He certainly recommended its adoption by the
Senate of the University. The candidate was asked
to send in a special list of books which he had read
with particular care and interest, and on which he
desired to be examined. It was the few minutes
devoted to this test which proved to be the
beginning of many a lifelong friendship between the
candidate who had crept, perhaps, abashed into the
examination hall and his very human examiner.
Fitch treasured the impressions of character and
the promise of future power which these oppor-
tunities often revealed to him. He would recount
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 117
with the delight of a child to the members of his
family in the evening every instance of peculiar
intelligence or of marked literary interest which
the day's work had brought to his notice. On
one occasion he was surprised to find that the
candidate, instead of selecting, offered the whole
range of English literature for his test. Fitch was
inclined to be amused, and perhaps a little annoyed,
at the apparent presumption of the choice, or,
rather, want of choice. But he was not easily
annoyed ; besides, he was taken with the can-
didate's look and manner. So he set himself
seriously to the rather ample task which had been
set him. He took his favourite authors, Chaucer,
the Elizabethan dramatists, Milton, Fuller, Dryden.
He found that the candidate's appreciation of
literature and of the development of thought
which it represented was as marked as the range
and accuracy of his knowledge. Fitch was de-
lighted. He was full of his brilliant candidate for
some days, and told everyone he met about him.
He looked anxiously for the lists to appear in
order that he might learn the name of his hero.
When at length they did appear, he found to his
delight that the ' number ' which he had examined
represented a son of his old friend, Mr. Llewellyn
Davies. This was the spirit in which Fitch in-
variably set himself to the somewhat prosaic duty
of an examiner. Even in the examination hall he
118 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
never forgot that he was engaged in the work of
education.
Another aspect of the function of Universities
which much occupied Fitch's thought was their
co-ordination of general culture and professional
learning. He regretted the growing English ten-
dency to separate them, the growing tendency of
the Universities themselves to depress the import-
ance of the professional faculties. He desired to see
professional training in the special work to which
human lives were to be dedicated as closely con-
nected as might be possible with that more general
culture which appertained to human beings as
such, with the learning which was rightly called
humane. It grieved him to observe that an in-
creasing number of young men were seeking
their professional instruction in legal and medical
schools, in colleges of engineering and practical
science, without the stamp of liberal learning
which they might have acquired within the walls
of one of the ancient Universities. He regretted
it because of the positive intellectual loss, but still
more because it fostered that spirit of mere pro-
fessional association which is only too ready to
assert its cramping influence among men engaged
in the same life-work. He used to quote with
whole-hearted approval a saying of his friend, the
late Lord Hobhouse, that ' the corporate spirit in
any profession is precisely that which it is easiest
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 119
to create, and which it is easiest to have in
excess.' He felt that the largest and most whole-
some parb of a man's influence in the world was
determined by those interests which he had in
common with all other men, or at least with as
many other men as possible. One part of the
work of Universities was to foster the intellectual
cultivation of those common interests, to provide
for the life of men, as men, a common intellectual
background. An indispensable condition of suc-
cess in this aim was that they should retain and
strengthen the ties which bound the professional
teaching to the University system. In a wise
and striking passage he indicated exactly the
kind and the measure of the influence of the
Church of England as a result of the University
training of her clergy.
f It is in every way a fortunate circumstance/
he wrote, f that the clergy of the Church of
England are, as a rule, not educated in theological
seminaries, but in communities which fairly reflect
the mind and tendencies of the non-clerical world ;
and it cannot be doubted that much of the legiti-
mate intellectual influence now exercised over
that world by the English clergy would be sacri-
ficed, even though greater skill in pastoral work
and in homiletics might easily be attained, by the
adoption of a more exclusively professional system
of clerical training.' Though written thirty years
120 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
ago, it was no doubt meant to be as much a
warning as a bare record of fact. And it was
written by one who, though he would have dis-
claimed the somewhat narrow zeal which has
come to be associated with the modern term, ' a
strong Churchman,' would still have claimed to
be a faithful and devoted member of the Church
of England.
But it was not merely to the revived importance
and activity of the existing professional faculties
at the ancient Universities that Fitch looked for
a hopeful future for English education. It was
to the extension of the connection of the Univer-
sities with all influential forms of national activity.
And the prospect of this extension in the case of
the newer Universities which obtained charters
during the later years of his life did, perhaps,
reconcile him to a development of the University
system which on other grounds he deplored. But
it was still to the older seats of learning that he
appealed for an adequate recognition of this need.
* The larger conception of a studium generate,' he
wrote in 1876, 'includes both general and specific,
both human and professional, culture. There is
no real inconsistenc} T between these two purposes.
And it is mainly to a University that a nation
ought to look for those influences which will pre-
vent the professions from degenerating into trades.
Is it too much to hope, as one looks wistfully
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS
down into the future, and thinks of the gigantic
possibilities which lie in the tradition, the wealth,
and the young intelligence of the English Uni-
versities, that means may yet be found by which
they may play a larger part in co-ordinating the
various elements in the intellectual life and the
practical activity of the nation, and that they
may accept it as their mission, not only to equip
for his vocation in the world the cultivated scholar
and gentleman, but also the accomplished jurist
or physician, the keen naturalist or engineer, and
the skilled schoolmaster ?'
It was to the case of the schoolmaster, as that
with which he had immediate and special concern,
that Fitch mainly directed his attention. He
hoped that an arrangement might be reached by
which a University course, reinforced by some
evidence of training in the theory and practice of
teaching, should be accepted in place of the certifi-
cate of elementary teachers, and that some at
least of the students of the older Universities
might be tempted to undertake the more important
posts in the field of elementary education. Thus
the Universities would do something to save the
profession of schoolmaster from becoming a trade
or to prevent it from remaining one. But it was
mainly in the sphere of secondary and higher
education that he hoped for substantial help from
the Universities. The means which he proposed
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
was the establishment of a professorial chair in
the science of teaching, in what must be described
by the unlovely name of Pedagogy. He knew,
indeed, how uninfluential the professorial system
had become in the English Universities. But
here again he hoped, and consistently pressed, for
reform. He was keenly alive to the intellectual
stimulus which the lectures of all the professors
ought to provide for young and eager minds, and,
though he frankly admitted that the tutorial
system tended to produce a greater thoroughness
and a more exact acquisition of knowledge, he
none the less bitterly regretted the decadence of
the professor's chair, and as ardently hoped for
its revival. Thorough Englishman as he was,
there was something in the character of Fitch's
mind which reminded one more of the Scotchman,
or the German, or the Frenchman. He had the
instinctive habit of arranging his impressions in
the form of general ideas, and the spontaneous
delight in them, which the Englishman seldom
possesses and always suspects. But he had, too,
the peculiarly English faculty for subordinating
his ideas to the clear exposition of a practical pro-
posal, and so he usually managed to win the con-
fidence of practical men interested in the same
subject as himself, and to gain his point, if not
directly, then indirectly. It was so in the case of
the University lectures on the science of teaching.
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS
He did not, indeed, persuade Oxford and Cam-
bridge of the neglected opportunities of the lecture-
hall. But he persuaded Cambridge of the necessity
of doing something for the training of the secondary
teachers of the country. And so the examinations
for University diplomas were inaugurated, and,
best of all, the lectureships were established which
produced as their first-fruits one of the most
inspiring contributions to the art and science of
good teaching which have ever been written,
his own famous ' Lectures on Teaching.'
One other aspect of University work, the for-
tunes of which Fitch followed with attention and
sustained by his advocacy may here be mentioned
the movement known as University Extension.
He was, indeed, one of those who, without know-
ing what they did, brought the movement, and
with it others of equal or greater importance, into
being. It was about the year 1866 that the
North of England Council for the Higher Educa-
tion of Women was founded. Mrs. J. E. Butler
was President, Miss Clough Secretary, and among
its original members were Mr. James Bryce and
Mr. Fitch. It was one of those associations of a
few reforming spirits, gifted with zeal, large ideas,
and practical wisdom, which become the germ of
important and far-reaching changes. One of its
original objects, for instance, was to induce the
University to promote the higher education of
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
women by itself undertaking the regular examina-
tion of girls' schools. The Council succeeded in
its endeavour, and the revolution which the Cam-
bridge Higher Local Examinations have effected
in the character of the teaching given to girls
was the direct result of its action. Another in-
direct result of the work which the Council suc-
ceeded in doing was the foundation of Newnham
College at Cambridge. But the University Ex-
tension movement with all that has grown out of
it, and may yet grow out of it, was, perhaps, the
most important development of the educational
machinery which the Council set in motion. The
original organization of this crusade of knowledge
was simple and unambitious, but its immediate
success soon justified a vast extension of its
original aim.
In the year 1867 Mr. James Stuart, Fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge, was asked by the
Council to lecture to women in Leeds, Liverpool,
Manchester, and Sheffield. Mr. Stuart's personal
influence and enthusiasm, and his remarkable
skill as a lecturer, at once made these lectures
popular. Fitch has himself described the progress
of the movement : ' The value of such lectures
was at once recognised as a means of directing
the reading and stimulating the appetite for
knowledge among girls who had recently left
school a class often sadly lacking in definite
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 125
aims and in motives for intellectual exertion.
But attention having once been drawn to the
nature of the need which had to be supplied, and
to the capacity of the University to supply it,
memorials began to crowd in upon the University
praying that the system might be extended in its
aim and purpose and placed on a recognised and
secure basis. From Crewe, from Rochdale, from
Leeds, Birmingham, and Nottingham, and from
the North of England Council for the Education
of Women, addresses were in 1873 sent to
Cambridge, urging that there was an increasing
desire among working men, among ladies who
were intending to be teachers, or otherwise en-
gaged in self-improvement, and especially among
young men employed in business, for systematic
instruction such as might be furnished by courses
of lectures, popular and interesting, but scientific
in method, continuous during a period of several
months in the year, and followed up by class-
work and by suitable examinations. A syndicate
was formed to consider these memorials, and the
result was the establishment of missionary lectures
in great towns, which have of late been so well
known under the name of the University Ex-
tension Scheme/
One of the most notable results of the
scheme was the eagerness with which rich citizens
of some of the great towns came forward with
126 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
offers of funds for the provision and equipment of
suitable buildings as lecture-halls. Fitch saw
in this outburst of enthusiasm on the part of
leading citizens even more than in the somewhat
fluctuating success of the lecture system itself a
great hope for the future of English education.
What was wanted, he saw, to give permanence
and real educational value to the scheme was such
a graduated sequence of study and such a measure
of recognition by the University of the knowledge
gained as would induce a larger number of those
who might desire to become serious students to
take advantage of it. He was not at all depressed
by the reaction which seemed to follow upon the
first outburst of enthusiasm. His experience told
him that such apparent decline of interest was
only too likely to accompany the attempt to give
greater precision and system to the courses of
study, to convert them from an occasional intel-
lectual excitement into a serious educational
instrument. But he saw at the same time that
the local guarantors would not long continue to
bear the burden of heavy losses in providing an
education for which there was no effective demand.
He feared the possible wreck of a scheme which
contained in itself the best kind of promise.
It was one of the opportunities for his largeness
of educational view and his clear judgment of the
possibilities of new and tentative movements. He
UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 127
appealed to the Universities to support the work
they had begun by something more than their
advice and the provision of missionary lecturers.
He claimed that what the movement needed, in
order that it might grow in value and permanence,
was exactly what the University could supply
viz., resident teachers and some recognition of suc-
cessful students as its own alumni. The Universi-
ties, he thought, might establish a certain number
of fellowships, on condition of their holders becom-
ing resident lecturers in certain towns, personally
directing the studies of their pupils, and con-
tributing by their presence to impress upon an
industrial community some sense of the usefulness
and the dignity of the higher learning. He pro-
posed, in short, to establish University colonies
throughout most of the great towns of England.
In the same way he hoped that some means might
be found of connecting the colleges which had
grown up in some of the largest towns with the
ancient Universities. Finally, he desired to see
the Universities recognise as their own pupils
those who had attended the lectures of their
missionary teachers and passed with a certain dis-
tinction an examination at the close of a specified
course of study, by some such plan as dispensing
such students from one of the necessary years
of residence at the University and from the
necessity of passing the Previous Examination, if
128 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
they should desire to prosecute their studies by
working for a University degree.
Such were some of the hopes and prospects
which opened out before the eager mind of Fitch
as he surveyed the field of English education, and
took accurate account of the vast work that needed
to be done, and of the instruments which were at
hand for its accomplishment. Never, perhaps,
was the principle of order so closely associated
with the instinct for reform as in his case. He
saw in extension from within, in an ordered
increase and development of the means at hand,
the true method of vital growth. He feared and
suspected the haphazard creation of new and
untried instruments, some of them futile and
ridiculous reproductions of the most questionable
aspects of institutions venerable by age and
length of service, some of them the mere daring
experiments of a raw and jejune empiricism.
Nowhere were both these tendencies of his mind
more conspicuously displayed than in his brilliant
and stimulating contributions to the question of
University reform.
CHAPTER V
WOMEN'S EDUCATION
IT is characteristic of all practical reforms that
they are no sooner accomplished than they become
part of the natural and necessary demand of
society. It is with the social body as with the
individual body : its gains become part of its
indispensable outfit ; they need no second proof.
' We might go freezing, ages give us fire ;
Thereafter we judge fire at its full worth,
And guard it safe through every chance, ye know P
Yet, just in proportion as the practical worth of
such gains is quickly absorbed into the life of
society, the arduous process by which they were
acquired is quickly forgotten. It is the fate of
nearly every reformer who lives long and has
been successful to see a generation arise which
takes for granted what he had spent his life in
accomplishing. Fitch was such a reformer. And
perhaps there is no change in which he had a
share which has come to be so generally taken for
129 9
130 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
granted as that which the past generation wrought
in the position of women. It is almost difficult
for us to realize that not two generations have
passed since the time when 'almost the only
resource open to a woman who was above the
rank of a domestic servant, and who desired to
earn her own living, was the profession of teach-
ing/ and when the whole field of public service
was, even more by general opinion than by
specific ordinance, resolutely closed against the
entrance of women. Though the battle for equal
opportunities to the sexes may not yet have been
won, it is rather because the indolence which
follows upon partial victory has descended upon
the attacking forces than because there is much
heart left in the ranks of opposition. Opinion
has been conquered even where the tradition of
the past still lingers in outward forms. Yet the
battle was of yesterday, and many of those who
bore its brunt are still with us. In it none
certainly took a worthier or more fruitful part
than Fitch. He was not only closely identi-
fied with every phase of the struggle, but he did
much also by his clear-sighted exposition of the
reasonableness and justice of the movement as
a whole to recommend it to those who might
have been offended by some of its incidental
expressions. Here, for instance, is an appeal
to the common interest which is as noble and
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 131
dignified in its conception as it is obviously true
to fact :
4 It cannot be doubted that in the intelligence
of many women, in their desire for truth, in their
high aims, and in their power to render service
to the world in which they live, there is a great
store of wealth which has never been adequately
recognised or turned to profitable account. The
world is made poorer by every restriction
whether imposed by authority or only conven-
tionally prescribed by our social usages which
hampers the free choice of women in relation to
their careers, their studies, or their aims in life.
It is probable that in many ways yet undis-
covered in certain departments of art, of scientific
research, of literature, and of philanthropic work
the contributions of women to the resources of
the world will prove to be of increasing value to
mankind. And it may also be that experience
will prove certain forms of mental activity to be
unsuitable. Nature, we may be sure, may be
safely trusted to take care of her own laws. The
special duties which she has assigned to one half of
the human race will always be paramount ; but of
the duties which are common to the whole human
race we do not know, and cannot yet know, how
large a share women may be able to undertake.
It is probably larger than the wisest of our con-
temporaries anticipate. If there be natural dis-
92
132 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
abilities, there is all the less reason for imposing
artificial disabilities. Hitherto every step which
has been taken in opening out new forms of active
work and increased influence to women has been
a clear gain to society, and has added much to the
happiness of women themselves. It is, therefore,
not merely the chivalry, or even the sense of
justice, but also the enlightened self-interest of
man, that are concerned in the solution of this
problem. It is not his duty to urge women in
the direction of employments they feel to be un-
congenial to them ; but it is his duty to remove
as far as possible all impediments and disqualifi-
cations which yet remain in restraint of their own
discretion, to leave the choice of careers as open
to them as it is to himself, and to wait and see
what comes of it. Nothing but good can come
of it.'
Here as elsewhere Fitch approached the work
of reform in a spirit of serene and persuasive
optimism. He preached the gospel of liberty
and the gospel of education, which, united, formed
the gospel of common-sense. There was a certain
amount of human stuff out of which the growing
substance of human history had to be fashioned.
There were no doubt certain limitations set in the
nature of things to the profitable use of that stuff
and of its different qualities, limitations which,
because they had been fixed by Nature, must be
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 133
learned and taken due account of. But there was
no other way of learning them than that of free
experiment. All apriorism in determining them
was a piece of sheer stupidity. It could only result
in establishing and consecrating artificial limita-
tions and in confusing them with the natural. Free
development alone would discover the measure, and
therefore the limits, of the usefulness of each unit
and each class of the total human society. Fitch,
with his fine sense of measure both in idea and
in language, would probably have detested the
phrase, ' the emancipation of woman.' But none
the less he knew that the thing which he strove
for was a free field for women.
Naturally his primary interest in the question
was where its solution depended upon his own
special work of education. His work on the
Schools Inquiry Commission had revealed to him
the immense ineptitude and the silly pretentious-
ness of what was considered by the majority of
middle-class people in England as a suitable
education for their girls. The characterization
of the defects of that teaching, as embodied in
the Commissioners' Report, sounds very like his
own language. It speaks of the teaching given
in girls' schools, or ladies' seminaries, as they
were called, as marked by l want of thoroughness
and foundation, want of system, slovenliness and
showy superficiality, inattention to rudiments,
134 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
undue time given to accomplishments, and those
not taught intelligently or in any scientific manner,
and a complete absence of proper organization.'
His own special report to that Commission upon
the state of secondary education in Yorkshire, with
its continual complaint that the ' pious founders '
of the past had entirely ignored the claim of girls
to education, shows how fully he must have con-
curred in the most revolutionary clause of the En-
dowed Schools Act of 1869. ' In framing schemes
under this Act provision shall be made, as far as
conveniently may be, for extending to girls the
benefits of endowments.' As one of the Assistant
Commissioners under that Act, he worked with
unwearied patience and tact to overcome the
timidity or the prejudice of trustees and to secure
for girls as large a share as was possible in the
advantages of those educational endowments of
the past. It was with a wholly impersonal satis-
faction that he chronicled towards the end of his
life the results of the famous twelfth clause the
more than eighty new secondary schools for girls
founded throughout the country under the Act,
the more than sixty schemes providing for girls,
by means of scholarships and otherwise, a share
in endowments formerly devoted entirely to the
education of boys. Fitch had indeed a peculiar
knack of inoculating even hard-headed men of busi-
ness with some of his own educational enthusiasm.
WOMEN'S EDUCATION
He somehow succeeded where a less direct and
simple nature might have despaired of success.
He was an excellent representative of the diplomacy
of modest simplicity and a witness to its success.
To him London owes the excellent schools of the
Haberdashers 1 Company, founded on revenues once
appropriated to the support of an alms-house with
twenty residents and of a charity school with
twenty-five pupils. It was one of his great ambi-
tions to use some of the many wasted local charities
in establishing a network of such schools round
London ; but even his patience was not sufficient
nor his life long enough to wear down the ignorance
and the prejudice which barred the way to such a
scheme.
But perhaps a more important, though an in-
cidental, outcome of the Report of the Schools
Inquiry Commission, and especially of Fitch's
contribution to it, was the establishment of the
Girls' Public Day School Company in 1874. The
intelligent and active-minded section of the com-
munity had been alarmed and awakened by the
revelations of that report. To Mrs. William
Grey and her sister, Miss Shirreif, were due the
conception and initiation of a scheme for providing
schools in the great centres of population in which
girls could receive the best secondary education
that was possible. The model for such schools
already existed in the Ladies' College at Chelten-
136 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
ham, founded so far back as 1854 by Miss Dorothea
Beale, and the North London Collegiate School for
Girls, founded in 1850 by Miss Frances Mary Buss.
Fitch was a member of the governing body of the
former school, and was also one of the most trusted
advisers and enthusiastic admirers of Miss Buss's
excellent work. It was natural, therefore, from
every point of view, that his help and advocacy
should be sought in launching the new project,
and just as natural that they should be freely
given. He helped not only by guiding the
principles of the whole movement, but by taking
an active personal interest in the fortunes of every
school founded by the Company which was within
his reach. Some notion of the range and value
of his interest in these schools may be obtained
from the following appreciation by Miss Jones,
the late head-mistress of the Netting Hill High
School for Girls :
' I first met Sir Joshua Fitch about thirty years
ago, shortly after my appointment as head-mistress
of the Notting Hill High School. I was then
greatly impressed by the keen interest he took
in the opening of a new type of schools for girls,
and from that time onwards until his death I
always felt that the higher education of women
had no truer, wiser, and more zealous friend
than he.
' As an Assistant Commissioner in the Schools
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 137
Inquiry Commission, Sir Joshua Fitch knew from
personal investigation to what a low ebb the
education of girls had sunk during the first half
of the nineteenth century, and as far as lay in
his power he helped on the movement which
resulted in the gradual opening of schools through-
out the length and breadth of England, where
girls might enjoy the same advantages as boys,
and receive as good an education as their brothers
were getting in public schools. Of immense value
to teachers in the newly -opened schools were Sir
Joshua Fitch's lectures on educational subjects.
In 1876 he gave at Exeter Hall three lectures on
the teaching of English, a subject which his marked
literary ability enabled him to invest with interest
as well as with profit. During the next year he gave
an admirable course of lectures on the " Science,
Art, and History of Education" which were as
inspiring as they were instructive, and many of
those who heard them at once began to put into
practice some of his valuable suggestions. Happily
the lectures on education which he delivered
at the University of Cambridge were published
in 1881, and soon found their way into school
libraries, where they have become a standard classic
on the aims and methods of teaching. They are
indeed a mine in which one may dig profitably
and find the great principles underlying all true
education admirably set forth, as well as the new
138 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
ideas and suggestions of one who had studied the
subject both as a science and as an art.
* Among the chief characteristics of Sir Joshua
Fitch were his wide, broad, temperate views on
all educational matters, and his freedom from fads
and eccentricities of all kinds. In the many
educational controversies of the last thirty years
his calm, clear judgment and his invariably
temperate language often formed a great con-
trast to the extremes indulged in by the opponents
of some existing system. On the subj ect of external
examinations, at one time so hotly discussed, he
wrote and spoke most reasonably. He would
point out how much we owe to external examina-
tions by showing up the schools, especially the
girls' schools, of pre-examination days, and whilst
allowing their possible abuse, he would acknow-
ledge their use when rightly conducted. Again,
many years ago there was a newspaper discus-
sion on " Brain and Nervous Pressure in Schools."
Sir Joshua Fitch read a paper on the subject
before the College of Preceptors. It was a very
able as well as a very temperate paper, owning
that some of the dangers were real, but that they
had been greatly exaggerated, and pointing out
forcibly that late hours and unhealthy entertain-
ments were often responsible for what is set down
to the pressure of school- work.
' Another of Sir Joshua Fitch's characteristics
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 139
was the extraordinary range as well as variety of
his educational knowledge and interests. From
the teaching and the codes of elementary schools
to the studies and aims of a University, from
the technical schools of Paris to the schools and
colleges of America, from the teaching of modern
languages to the training and registration of
teachers on all these subjects his knowledge
was great and accurate, whilst the literary form
in which that knowledge was often set forth for
the public added greatly to its interest.
1 To myself personally Sir Joshua Fitch invari-
ably showed great kindness, as well as much
sympathy with my work. Both he and Lady
Fitch always took a special interest in the Netting
Hill High School. About six years ago Lady
Fitch distributed the prizes, whilst Sir Joshua
gave an admirable address to the girls, not for-
getting a few wise words to the parents. He
always knew exactly what to say and how to say
it, which is not invariably the case with those who
make speeches on such occasions. And now that
he has gone from among us, I mourn his loss not
only as a personal friend of many years' standing,
but as a great and wise authority on all educa-
tional matters/
It is an appreciation which may seem to take
us far beyond the limits of Fitch's interest in the
schools, but it is at least pertinent as revealing
140 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the measure of his effect upon them by the inspi-
ration which his wisdom and knowledge contri-
buted to the teachers themselves. Indeed, perhaps
his most notable influence upon education in his
time and it was an influence which, from the
nature of the case, was felt more in the education
of girls than of boys was that he helped to create
a new feeling of the dignity and worth of the
teachers' craft. As another head-mistress, Miss
Andrews, of the Maida Vale High School, said of
him, 'he looked on the work of teaching as a
sacred calling the noblest in which a man or
woman could engage. 7 And he imparted his view
to all the best teachers, especially women teachers,
of his time. He founded, in short, a new school
of teachers. He acted as a kind of informal
spiritual director to a great professional class.
Miss Beale says of him : ' He did not consider that
the duty of an inspector or a critic was chiefly to
find fault, but, when he saw anything going right,
to say " Well done !" pointing out at the same time
how improvements might be made. We used to
try to arrange our Teachers' Guild meetings when
he was in Cheltenham, and ask him to address
us on the subject of the evening. His patience
seemed inexhaustible, and his sympathy with the
difficulties not merely of teachers generally, but
of heads of schools, very great and helpful.'
One further witness to the impression which
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 141
Fitch made upon the great band of women
engaged in the work of teaching in our time may
be adduced, not only for the warmth of its
appreciation, but by reason of the quarter from
which it comes. The success of the Girls' Public
Day School Company stimulated the Church of
England to launch a similar venture for members
of its own communion. It was one of the few
new schemes for the development of women's
education with which Fitch was not directly con-
nected. It seemed to him, with his special way
of regarding the Church in its relation to the
national life, as unnecessary, and tending to a
sectarianism which he suspected and feared, that
the Church should insist upon providing special
institutions of her own, and repudiate those which
had already been established upon a national basis.
Yet once the Church of England High Schools for
Girls had been founded, he took exactly the same
interest in their welfare as in the fortunes of those
with which he was more directly associated. It
is therefore the more pleasing to be able to quote
the testimony of the head of one of the schools,
Miss Strong.
* It was my misfortune to come very little into
personal contact with Sir Joshua, but that little
only confirmed the impression which I had built
up in my thoughts from the study of his writings,
especially his book on teaching. In that book
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
he made me realize his intense enthusiasm for
teaching, and for the profession of the teacher,
but I felt it was an enthusiasm tempered with
the most excellent judgment, with exceptional
breadth of thought and elasticity of mind gifts
so often lacking to the man of zeal. I never to
this day read a page of that book on teaching
without being uplifted as a teacher, without having
the dignity of my work presented to me, without
having my enthusiasm and my zeal pricked on ;
and I never talked, even for a few minutes, with
Sir Joshua without having these same feelings
kindled within me. I believe we differed widely
in our views on some matters apart from educa-
tion, but what I always felt so very strongly
about him was that he never allowed differences to
prejudice, and that is a rare gift which one ac-
knowledges very gratefully when one meets it.'
This movement for improving the secondary
education of girls owed much of its success to the
fact that it was supplemented by a scheme to
provide them with University education as well.
The most prominent pioneer in this work was
Miss Emily Davies, and from the earliest days of
her patient and vigorous campaign she had Mr.
Fitch's warmest interest and most valuable sup-
port in all her efforts. As far back as 1862 he
read before the Social Science Congress a paper
written by Miss Davies on the whole subject
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 143
of women's education. The women's colleges in
London, Bedford and Queen's, which had owed
their origin and much of their immediate success
to the vigorous interest of Maurice and Kingsley,
seemed to Fitch the promise of fuller opportunities
for women's share in the higher education of the
Universities. He felt that these opportunities
would be honourably and satisfactorily secured only
when the ancient Universities had been induced
to recognise it as their duty to provide them, or at
least to acknowledge and encourage them. When,
therefore, in 1867 Miss Davies, Lady Stanley of
Alderley, and others succeeded in founding a
college at Hitchin, chosen because it was a half-
way house between London and Cambridge, for
carrying on this work, Fitch was one of the first
to give a hearty adhesion to the scheme. Seven
years after the college was transferred to Girton,
near Cambridge. The final step had been taken
in asserting the claim of women to share in the
best and fullest knowledge of the time. Nor was
it long allowed to remain the single instance of
this demand. Already in 1871 Miss Clough had
established Newnham College in Cambridge, and
soon afterwards Somerville College was founded
at Oxford, to be followed in time by Lady Margaret
Hall and St. Hugh's Hall. From the first Fitch
was on the governing body of Girton. His chief
interest was centred in the bold yet patient efforts
144 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
of Miss Davies and Miss Clough to give to the
colleges the educational status which they desired
by securing for their pupils the tests which the
University applied to men. These attempts he
followed with a keen and critical attention, and
he hailed each success as a temporary position
from which to work for more. He was by no
means one of those fiery spirits whose impassioned
zeal for reform blinds them to the difficulties
which a deeply-rooted and wide-branching tradi-
tion has set in its path. He appreciated the
hesitation of the ancient Universities to take the
step of admitting women to the full privileges of
University membership which might involve a
radical reconstruction of the whole fabric of their
endowments, and of the constitution established by
their means. But if he appreciated it, he did not
for a moment accept it as necessary. He exposed
its unfairness with a fairness which must yet win
the day for the view which he espoused. Mean-
while he constantly counselled action on the part
of the authorities of the women's colleges which
would leave the way open for the final settlement
of equal privileges for men and women within the
Universities, and would exclude any other solu-
tion. He stoutly resisted the idea of a special
examination for women. He rejoiced when that
plan, on its being tried at Oxford in 1875, broke
down and was superseded by the first step towards
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 145
the admission of women to all University ex-
aminations. He approved of the Girton scheme
of procuring informal examination of its students
by the University examiners on the papers set in
the University itself as the surest means of com-
pelling in time a formal admission to the ordinary
tests.
Meanwhile, where he had the power, he urged
home the necessity of insuring this measure of
justice to women where the difficulties of yielding
it were not so great. It is a little astonishing to
recall now with what opposition the proposal to
open the degrees of the University of London to
women was met. Sir Richard Quain was the
head and front of that opposition ; but in Fitch
he had a foeman of fine temper as a fighter,
of patient and unbending purpose, and of un-
challenged authority. In the modern University
it was not necessary to effect reform by experi-
mental stages. The opposition was, perhaps,
more bitter and prejudiced than at the ancient
Universities, but when it was overcome it was
overcome completely. In 1878 the University
obtained a new charter enabling persons of both
sexes to graduate in all faculties on equal terms.
Fitch lived to see a group of still younger Univer-
sities concede, as an original element of their
constitutions, the same equality of privilege to men
and women. He lived, too, to see women sitting
10
146 SIR JOSHUA FITCll
on the Senate of the reconstructed University of
London. There was a certain irony in the in-
gratitude of a body which deprived the reformer
of the position on its Senate which he had so long
held while so fully recognising the furthest im-
plications of the reform.
Like every thinker who is also a practical worker,
Fitch was also a learner. In later years indeed,
throughout the main term of his advocacy of the
cause of women's education he consistently and
strongly pressed the view that the subjects of
women's study should be determined by themselves,
that their special aptitudes should be subject to the
test of free experiment, and that there was, there-
fore, no need for a special type of education suited
to their supposed needs. The project of a women's
University, which commended itself more to some
women, seemed to him not merely unnecessary,
but, in the present stage of educational experi-
ment, retrograde. Yet that that was not always
his view the following letter, written to Miss
Davies in 1863, one of the few letters of his
which it has been possible to recover, will show :
' . . . My ideal curriculum for a women's Univer-
sity differs much from that adopted at the existing
Universities of England. It gives the prominence
to history, modern languages, literature, and
especially to certain branches of inductive science,
rather than to the ancient languages, logic, and
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 147
the pure mathematics. There is almost as great
a difference between the intellectual needs of men
and those of women as between the practical
pursuits of their lives. So I neither expect nor
hope that the orthodox academic course will ever
become very generally adopted by women. As a
rule, indeed, such a course is neither necessary nor
useful to them. But I feel sure that the present
arrangements which forbid all women to compete
for University degrees are clearly unjust, and
ought to be altered. A woman is better able than
anyone else can be to judge whether a certain
form of mental activity is good for her ; and if she
thinks it worth while to obtain for herself a
particular kind of knowledge, she is entitled to
have her exertions encouraged and her success
recognised exactly as if she were a man.
* The difference between the mental character-
istics of one woman and another is as great as
between those of the average man and the average
woman, and I can easily believe that to many
women the sort of discipline by which a degree is
to be won would prove very healthy and ennobling.
At any rate, we have no right to interpose any
hindrances in the way of one single honourable
effort which a woman may be disposed to make
in this direction.
* The only way in which a community can get
the maximum amount of good from its individual
102
148 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
members is to leave to each the choice of the
particular form of intellectual exertion which
he or she prefers. Men claim this liberty
for themselves, and refuse, as individuals, to
be bound by rules merely because, on theory,
those rules are considered best for the majority.
It is unfair that the same freedom of choice as to
a career in life, and as to the kind of distinction
most worthy of attainment, should be denied to
women. I cannot doubt that, if the present re-
straints were removed, and if women were invited
to bring their own intellectual attainments to the
same tests to which men bring theirs, great good
would be accomplished. For every one who
obtained a degree, at least a hundred would be
beneficially influenced by the fact that a degree
was obtainable. There is no better way of raising
the general level of intelligence in any community
than by affording opportunities to some to rise
above that level ; and so long as the intellectual
ambition of the most accomplished women is
systematically checked by barriers which accident
has raised and prejudice keeps up we have no
right to complain that the average standard of
female education is low.
' I confess to you that it is only by slow degrees
that I have come to my present conclusion. All
my feelings and habits of thought rebelled against
the proposal when it was first made; but the
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 149
whole question becomes daily clearer to me as
simple matter of right and wrong, and I feel sure
it will ultimately be solved in the way you desire.
That our systems of education should be so altered
that the present University curriculum shall be
enforced on women, or even generally recommended
to them, I certainly do not desire, but that degrees
should be accessible to all who covet them and are
disposed to work for them seems to me very
evident, and will not, I hope, be long denied/
In 1882 a Pro visional Committee was formed to
take measures for establishing a hall of residence
in London for women students, principally those
attending University College and the London
School of Medicine for Women. College Hall, as
it was called, was constituted provisionally for a
space of three years under the direction of the
late Miss Grove, and at the end of the three
years of trial a meeting of subscribers was
called to arrange for its future, over which
Fitch presided. As a result of this meeting
the Hall was incorporated as a limited liability
company in 1886. Fitch's experience was, as
usual, freely placed at the service of the Council,
and it was principally owing to his advice that an
endowment fund was started, out of which the
rent of the three houses in Byng Place, which
formed the Hall, should be paid. Such institu-
tions, he pointed out, in order to be successful,
150 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
should start with a free gift of building and equip-
ment, or at least with an equivalent in the way
of endowment, so that these charges might not fall
upon a maintenance fund. It was in such humble
ways that this friend of the education of women
was ready to steer every fresh enterprise for
its furtherance through the shoals of its first
beginnings into the deep waters of the open
sea. It is not wonderful that the gratitude of all
friends cf this cause followed him throughout life
and still lingers about his memory. A picture of
him hangs in College Hall, the gift of Miss Annie
Leigh Browne, who was its honorary secretary from
its foundation to 1890, with the inscription : ' Sir
Joshua Fitch, LL.D., one of the earliest supporters
of College Hall. He presided at the meeting held
in University College in April, 1882 (when the
scheme for a College Hall of residence took shape),
and was a member of the Council from 1889 until
the time of his death in 1903.'
Fitch's championship of women's education was
always based upon the broadest grounds. Educa-
tion released human power and developed it.
That must be the sufficient motive of its advocacy.
' Even though the knowledge or power which are
the product of a liberal education may seem to
have no bearing at all upon the special business
or definite duties of a woman, yet if it be felt by
its possession to make life more full, more
WOME1STS EDUCATION 151
varied, and more interesting, and better worth
living, no other justification is needed for placing
the largest opportunities within her reach/ Educa-
tion was primarily concerned with the liberation
and development of qualities which were simply
human. Only after this work of liberation and
development had been continued for some time
was it desirable to enlist those qualities, or possible
to enlist them successfully, in some special type of
life-work. The liberal education ought always to
precede the professional. And it was with the
liberal education of women that he was primarily
concerned. But he did not on that account with-
hold his interest and sympathy from the many
attempts which women were making to utilize
their liberal learning in professional service. He
seemed to appreciate at once the importance of
woman's choice of the medical profession, without
any of the preliminary conflict with ingrained
prejudices through which most people who came
in time to accept the change won their way to
such acceptance. He was one of the best friends
of the London School of Medicine for Women.
Mrs. Garrett Anderson and Mrs. Thome both
testify to the value of his help in the foundation
of the school.
But it was not only on the more dignified
forms of professional work for women that he
bestowed thought and care. He was possessed
152 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
by a great jealousy that women might show
themselves everywhere equal to the tasks which
they had so hardly won to undertake. He felt
as though his personal honour was at stake in
the loyalty of women to public trusts. There
was at one time a newspaper outcry over the
alleged negligence of women employed in the
service of the Post Office. It is just possible that
women of a class too long accustomed to the
mask of polite submission to the most despotic
vagaries of the shopping woman may have
acquired with too great ease, and perhaps, too,
with something of a savage pleasure, the habit of
abrupt defiance or of wearied tolerance which the
official so often manages to import into his deal-
ings with the layman. But Fitch would have
none of this tendency, if, indeed, it had begun to
appear. He addressed a gathering of these
workers, called together by the committee of the
Society for the Employment of Women, during
the thick of the newspaper discussion. It was an
appeal, marked by all his natural tact, to the
women workers to remember that they were
pioneers in a great movement ; that they held in
their keeping the honour of their sisters as capable
of the worthiest type of public service ; that their
admission to the ranks of public servants meant
not merely a position of economic freedom for
themselves, but also an arduous responsibility
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 153
towards others. Fitch had that simple faith
in human nature which is not afraid of treating
it seriously. He had plenty of humour, and
perhaps it was that which made him fearless
of applying the sermon in season. He applied
it in this case with complete success.
It was natural that Fitch should be appealed
to by most of those who in his day were anxious
to imitate and repeat the educational benefactions
of the past, and especially by all who wished to
devote their wealth to the promotion of women's
education. When, for instance, the late Mr.
Pfeiffer, a city merchant, left 60,000 for this
purpose, he named Mr. Mundella, who was then
Vice-President of the Council, along with Mr.
Fitch and Miss Anna Swanwick, as a consultative
committee to apportion it as they might deem fit.
Mr. Pfeiffer and his wife, Mrs. Emily Pfeiffer, the
poetess, whose name he specially desired to be
associated with his own in the bequest, were
enthusiasts in the cause of women's education.
The will is a somewhat unconventional confession
of faith. ' I have always had/ it begins, ' and
am adhering to, the idea of leaving the bulk of
my property for charitable and educational pur-
poses in favour of women. Theirs is, to my mind,
the great influence of the future. Education
and culture and responsibility in more than one
direction, including that of politics, will gradually
154 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
fit them for the exercise of every power that could
possibly work towards the regeneration of man-
kind. It is women who have hitherto had the
worst of life, and I therefore have determined to
help them to the best of my ability and means.
Moreover, boys should work out their own career,
and not be brought up with a silver spoon in their
mouth. The world would be by far the better
were every boy made to work, and no money be
left, except in peculiar cases, for him to lean and
depend on. I have therefore arranged my be-
quests in accordance with these never-forsaken
views. ... The remaining part of my property
I desire to be divided as endowments among
charities or educational establishments on behalf
of women I repeat, of women solely.'
Fitch was evidently enamoured of the spirit of
this document. He loved to quote its phrases
wherever opportunity made it apposite to recall
them. On Miss Swanwick and himself the main
burden of selection for its benefactions was laid.
With the sanction of the Court of Chancery,
Girton and Newnham received 5,000 each out of
the bequest, and a sum of not less than 2,000 was
allotted to each of a number of other educational
institutions, including Bedford and Queen's
Colleges ; the School of Medicine for Women ; the
Maria Grey Training College in London ; Somer-
ville Hall, Oxford; the Women's Training
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 155
College in Cambridge ; the Women's Colleges and
Halls attached to Trinity College, Dublin, to the
Universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews, and
to the Welsh Colleges at Cardiff and Aberystwyth,
besides the Society for the Employment of
Women, the Hall of Residence attached to Uni-
versity College, and the College for Working
Women. The choice illustrates the width of
Fitch's knowledge of educational work for women
and the catholicity of his sympathy with it.
There was not a single one of these institutions
whose value he could not have exactly appraised,
and there were few which he had not helped
either to bring into existence or to guide with his
wisdom and experience.
Another scheme in which Fitch's advice was
largely drawn upon and as liberally given was
the founding of Hollo way College. Mr. Thomas
Holloway seems to have consulted him with
regard to almost every clause of the founder's
deed, and to have been greatly influenced by his
counsel. There are letters from Mr. Holloway
covering a period of five years, and dealing with
the minutest points of the scheme ; but as Fitch's
answers are missing, it is only possible to guess at
the actual details of the constitution of the college
which are due to him. Two things at least are
clear : that the founder was not always easily
persuaded by his advisers, and that he recog-
156 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
nised, and in the main yielded to, Fitch's authority
in all the purely educational aspects of his scheme.
It is evident, too, that Fitch devoted himself to
its perfecting with a thoroughness which witnessed
to his sense of immediate personal responsibility
for its success. It was characteristic of the man
in all that he undertook.
It would, indeed, be impossible to enumerate all
the projects, educational or otherwise, for further-
ing the influence and employment of women in
which Fitch had a share, and always a leading
share. An association was formed in 1897 for
promoting the employment of high-school girls
in elementary school work. The Archbishop of
Canterbury * became its President, and among the
many leading men and women who consented to
serve on its committee was that constant friend
of all educational causes, the present Bishop of
Southwark. Miss Judith Merivale, of University
Hall, Bangor, who acted as the honorary Secretary
of the association, writes : ' Our association was
formed in May, 1897, and Sir Joshua Fitch was
one of the first who consented to join it ; and
from that time he was present at all our meetings,
and acted as chairman of the executive com-
mittee. His wide knowledge of educational
matters, and his real concern for the welfare of
both teachers and taught, made his co-operation
most valuable, because his counsel was always
* Dr. Temple.
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 157
not only wise, but kindly. He was in sympathy
with ail who are doing their best for the schools ;
and while strongly convinced of the need for
bringing into our elementary schools a fresh
element drawn from other sources, he still fully
appreciated the value of the work done by those
teachers who are devoting their best energies to
the service of the elementary schools in which
they have themselves been trained. It was this
spirit of kindliness which if I may add a personal
word I think I always felt most strongly in my
intercourse with him, and which made him always
ready to give his time and experience to help us
in any difficult question that might arise/
It was the same kind of interest in giving as
much vividness and variety as was possible to the
teaching in elementary schools, and in employing
especially for that purpose the peculiar influence
and teaching capacity of educated women, that
led him to support the movement inaugurated by
Miss Isabel Fry for the organization of volunteer
teaching in elementary schools. Miss Fry had
herself tested the value of such work, and founded
a society to help all those who were taking part
in it by bringing them into touch with each other,
and to induce others to devote themselves to it.
Fitch knew quite well all the disadvantages which
might attend its working : the possible disorgani-
zation of time-tables and relaxation of discipline ;
the disfavour with which some of the better class
158 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
of teachers, wedded to their routine, might view
the scheme ; and its lazy acceptance by the more
indifferent. But he felt also that its main effect
would be for good, that it would bring into the
schools that element of freshness and reality
which he always so much desired to see associated
with the teaching of children, and so he gladly
consented to take part in the working of the
society. He always knew exactly what was to
be expected from any new project, and his great
hopefulness robbed him of the official fear of
giving his name to anything which had in it the
seeds of usefulness.
The training of women teachers in secondary
schools was naturally one to which he always
gave much thought and constant counsel. With
the Maria Grey Training College and the Training
College for Women Teachers at Cambridge he
had been closely associated from their beginnings.
But no such institution came into existence in his
time without calling for his advice and command-
ing his support. Miss Alice Woods, the dis-
tinguished head of the Maria Grey College, thus
recalls her impressions of his work as a member
of the Council : * He was so extremely careful and
cautious, and always looked at questions from
every side ; but if circumstances justified a course
of action which he considered unwise, he was very
ready to admit that he had been mistaken. The
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 159
rare occasions on which he could find time to
lecture to the students, or help with the criticism
lessons, were welcome days for everyone. He
helped forward the work of training on every
possible occasion hoth in public and in private,
and had so wide an outlook in educational
matters that there was scarcely anyone to whom
I felt it more helpful to appeal in any difficult
educational problem.' One other testimony to
the interest he took in the work of training may
be quoted. The Mother Superior of the Roman
Catholic Training College in Cavendish Square
writes : ' His first visit to us was paid on
March 10, 1896, as we had applied to the
Cambridge authorities to recognise us as a train-
ing college. Sir Joshua was sent to look into our
scheme of work, etc., and it was my privilege to
see him on each occasional visit and to receive his
instructions. He was so thorough in the work,
and so patient in listening to any difficulties, that
I soon learnt to rely upon him as a good friend.
Several visits of inspection were paid during that
year and 1897. At last, when he decided that
we might apply again to the University, he ex-
pressed a wish to meet Cardinal Vaughan and
hear what his wishes were about a Catholic
college. This showed, I thought, his kind con-
sideration for the opinions of others. Accord-
ingly, on November 18, 1897, the two great men
160 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
met here, with the result that, at Sir Joshua's
kind intervention on our behalf, we received the
letter of recognition from Cambridge which has
established our work here so satisfactorily. I
always feel we lost in him a true friend. On one
occasion I appealed to him as a last hope to gain
some little concession for a foreign student. He
exerted himself most kindly, called to learn
further particulars, and obtained by his authority
a favour which a less considerate patron would
hardly have troubled himself about.'
But it was not in the matter of women's educa-
tion alone that Fitch's sympathies were enlisted.
He rejoiced over every fresh opportunity of
applying women's peculiar power and influence
to the public service. He was a warm and con-
sistent advocate of the extension to them of the
Parliamentary suffrage. He resented the later
expedient of co-opting women to service on special
committees, with certain restricted duties, of
public bodies, and claimed for them the right to
election and to full control. He placed the
highest value upon their work on Boards of
Guardians and in the administration of all
charitable trusts. He hailed every new demon-
stration of their skill and capacity in professional
work. Perhaps the greatest pleasure which he
knew in later years came to him from the appoint-
ment of women on the Consultative Committee of
WOMEN'S EDUCATION 161
the newly-constituted Board of Education. He
felt, in short, that from the point of view of the
public service woman was a newly-discovered
national asset not merely a reserve of power
hitherto untouched, but a fund of power comple-
mentary to that of man. Yet it was not with a
view to the mere development of this kind of
service that he so strongly advocated the educa-
tion of women as a national duty ; it was still
more with a view to the development of the power
and quality of her service in the home, and to the
introduction of that quality of service into public
life. In a remarkable address on ' The Part of
Women in National Education/ which he de-
livered before the Association of University
Women Teachers in January, 1902, he urged this
point most forcibly.
' Man/ he said, * may make the machinery and
contrive the instruments of administration, but
the motive force which sets the machinery in
action comes in a large degree from the sentiments
and moral ideals that are cherished by the best
women. It will always be true that men will
wish to be and try to be what women will admire
and respect; and when the ideals of women are
noble and right, the whole standard of life and
conduct and manners of the society in which they
move is lifted up to a higher plane. I think that
as this becomes more generally recognised, the
11
162 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
function which women have to discharge in
education will be seen to become more and more
important. Schoolmasters cannot help looking at
what they teach in its bearing on the market, on
the workshop, on the profession, or on public life
and duty. Schoolmistresses will not, of course,
disregard these things, but they will be freer to
consider the bearing of what they teach mainly
on the home. Now, to every good man, and to
all women, the home is the centre of the world,
the sacred enclosure in which the highest enjoy-
ment is to be found, and in which all that is best
in human character grows and flourishes. What-
ever, therefore, makes the home more dignified
and more attractive helps to make the life of all
the inmates better worth living, and proves to be a
moral safeguard, as well as a source of happiness.'
It rings true, this exaltation of the home as
the centre of life. It sounds like the sincere
expression of a personal experience, as most things
that Fitch ever said or wrote did. It was no
doubt to his native chivalry, to his love of free-
dom, to his sense of justice, that Fitch's incom-
parable advocacy of the claims of women was due.
But it was due also, and above all, to the fact
that he enjoyed all his life long the blessings of a
home of the most intimate charm, where he daily
offered and received the comfort and sustenance
of a supreme affection.
CHAPTEE VI
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT'
WHEN, in Bacon's ' New Atlantis,' the Father of
Solomon's House has set forth the end of the
foundation and the 'preparations and instruments'
by which it is to be achieved, he proceeds to de-
scribe ' the several employments and functions
whereto our fellows are assigned/ And in the
forefront he places those ' twelve that sail into
foreign countries, who bring us the books, and
abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other
parts.' These are the 'merchants of light.' Fitch
was never so happy as when serving as a 'merchant
of light.' It was impossible for him, as, indeed,
it is impossible for any cultivated man, to find
himself among strange peoples and in the midst
of those unfamiliar human conditions which do
so much to stimulate observation and challenge
thought, without storing up fresh impressions as
to the conduct of life and the effect of various
types of educational method upon it. He had,
besides, the advantage over most observers that
163 U2
164 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
he brought to his observation ' a life spent train-
ing for the sight/ He had a wide and accurate
knowledge of the educational systems of modern
nations, and he was continually correcting and
vivifying the knowledge of the study by the close
scrutiny for which travel gave the opportunity.
No one felt more than he the practical fallacy in-
volved in the attempt to transplant institutions
which had worked well in one country into the
soil of another, which might be so constituted as
to afford them no promise of healthy growth.
But, none the less, he knew that there were few
local experiments which had not their universal
bearing, that it was a responsibility laid upon all
who were zealous for education to discover how
such experiments might be made to bear profitably
on the work of instruction in their own countries,
and that in proportion to the special appropriate-
ness of the experiments to one set of conditions
there was the more need of thought and imagina-
tion in disengaging their universal worth and
incorporating it in an alien system.
Fitch's best work in this kind is contained in
his ' Notes on American Schools and Colleges,'
and in the * Memorandum on the Working of the
Free School System in America, France, and
Belgium/ which was presented to both Houses of
Parliament in 1891. Each of these reports is
marked by his characteristic thoroughness, sym-
A MERCHANT OF LIGHT ' 165
pathy, and judgment. He confined himself to a
record of what he had observed, and refrained
from hasty generalizations as to the peculiar ex-
cellences or defects of the systems which he
reviewed. He was anxious only that the record
of his experience might sink gradually into the
most thoughtful section of the public mind. ' No
attempt,' he says, at the conclusion of his Memo-
randum of 1891, 'has been made here to discuss
the significance of the facts now collected in their
bearing on any of our controversies at home. But
it is thought possible that a simple account of the
conditions under which free school systems exist
in other countries may be of some service, if not
for warning or for guidance, at least for sugges-
tion and helpful comparison/ It was in the same
spirit that he issued his ' Notes on American
Schools. ' e As to mere figures, statistics, and printed
reports,' he says, 'they may prove seriously mislead-
ing, unless the special conditions which give their
true significance to their details are thoroughly
understood.' He had just received a lesson from
America itself in the fatal ease with which the
most unjust and unwarranted conclusions may
be drawn from statistics imperfectly understood.
Dr. Edward Everett Hale, one of the most dis-
tinguished and fair-minded citizens of the United
States, had just contended in the Forum (July,
1889) that there were twenty times as many
166 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
readers in America in the same population as there
were in England. This remarkable conclusion he
deduced from the figures, obtained from Whitaker's
Almanack, of the expenditure upon public educa-
tion in Great Britain. He found that Great
Britain, with a population of 35,000,000, had
spent 17,000,000 dollars on education, while in
the same time the State of Massachusetts, with
less than 2,000,000 people, had spent 6,000,000
dollars. It was not difficult for Fitch to show
how fallacious the mechanical use of statistics had
been, how the 6,000,000 dollars of Massachusetts
had been spent on higher and intermediate, as
well as on elementary, education, while the
17,000,000 dollars of Great Britain formed only
that part of the money spent on one kind of
education the elementary which was supplied
by a Parliamentary grant, while even on that
kind the actual expenditure from all sources was
35,000,000 dollars. Fitch knew too well the de-
ceitfulness of statistics the dangers of a random
and mechanical use of them to make mistakes of
this kind himself. Besides, he felt keenly the
odium and the general futility of comparisons.
Yet he knew how to learn, and to help others to
learn, from the educational experience of other
countries, and there were very few educational
controversies of his later years to which he did
not bring some light from such sources.
A MERCHANT OF LIGHT ' 167
America had always attracted him. His hope-
ful spirit had seen in it the unknown possibilities
of a vigorous race straining towards the future.
He admired the fearlessness, the audacity, the
self-possession, the candour, the generosity and
warm-heartedness, above all, the instinct for
public service, and the enthusiasm for righteous
causes, of its people. Even where a certain fas-
tidiousness in him recoiled from the brusqueness
which occasionally accompanied the manifestation
of these virtues, he still appreciated them at their
full worth. The American want of reserve did
not repel him as it repels so many Englishmen.
He felt the reality and warmth of the human
interest which it expressed. It was, therefore, a
great pleasure to him when, in 1888, he was
allowed an extension of his official holiday for the
purpose of visiting America and reporting on its
schools and colleges. The Americans prized him
as much as he prized them. Already his name
was a household word among all interested in
education in the States. For years he had con-
tributed to the Educational Review (edited by
Dr. Murray Butler, the President of Columbia
University, and, next to Dr. Eliot of Harvard,
perhaps the most influential figure in the educa-
tional life of America), a monthly record of the
progress of education and of educational thought
in England. His ' Lectures on Teaching ' had
168 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
had a great vogue, and exercised a profound
influence among all those engaged in teaching
throughout the country. Everything that he
had written since was eagerly looked for. He
had come, in short, to be something of an educa-
tional oracle in America. It was natural, there-
fore, that a country naturally hospitable, and so
much predisposed in his favour, should receive
him with open arms. The Americans were as
anxious to learn from him as he was to learn from
them.
His own feeling of the interest of the
New World may best be expressed in his own
words, written long afterwards : ' There is no
country in the world whose social and intellectual
progress is so profoundly interesting and so full
of significance to the thoughtful Englishman, and
none wherein the institutions and polity, the
ideas and experience of the people, will so well
repay his attentive study. All the interest of
his journey lies in the help he gains for the con-
templation of the future. He finds himself in the
presence of some of the most potent forces which
will move the world in the coming centuries, and
he cannot fail to be struck with the pace at which
life is lived, the energy and enterprise of the
people, their boundless exhilaration and hopeful-
ness, their consciousness of power, and their con-
fidence in themselves.' It was just the kind of
A ' MERCHANT OF LIGHT ' 169
satisfaction which an eager spirit like his desired
the satisfaction of contact with a life which was
marching with unfearing confidence towards the
future. Everyone he met interested him. His wife
and their niece, who accompanied him, enjoyed it
all as frankly as he did himself. They were ideal
travellers, preserving the freshness of their interest
on the longest journey, and ready at the end to
admire all that some new host was eager to show
them. Fortunately, they had all three that un-
failing and vivid interest in things and people
which at least in a climate like the American
made rest all but unnecessary. Their stay in
New England they specially enjoyed. They were
there just in time for that feast of colour, its
autumn woods.
But it was Boston itself, its memories and its
celebrities, that most attracted them. Francis Park-
man, the historian, received them at his beautiful
house in Jamaica Plain. Though a great invalid,
he insisted on accompanying them himself to all
the spots which had grown familiar and dear to him
through long association. They visited Wendell
Holmes at Beverley Farm, where he then lived
with his married daughter. Phillips Brooks was
an old friend, whom they had often met and
always enjoyed meeting in London, Fitch had
an intense admiration of Brooks both as a man
and as a preacher. One of his most valued
170 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
possessions in his house in Leinster Square was a
portrait of Brooks, which the great preacher had
sent him, and which reached London only after
his death.
But Fitch did not allow himself to be diverted
by American hospitality from the main purpose of
his mission. Wherever he went, he kept his eyes
open to note every unfamiliar detail of new educa-
tional experiments. One of the things that most
interested him was the ' co-education ' scheme of
some of the higher colleges and Universities
the provision for teaching young men and young
women in the same classes and under the same
professors. Another was the arrangement in
college chapels, like that of Harvard, by which
representatives of the different religious denomina-
tions were asked to preach throughout term. He
recalls, for instance, how he found on the rota of
University preachers for a single year the name of
Phillips Brooks, followed by those of well-known
Unitarian, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist
ministers. The naturalness and suitability of
such an arrangement to the American mind
seemed to him a measure of the distance which
separated opinion in the Old World and the New
on the relations of the Churches to one another,
and to the great educational foundations.
Anxious above everything else to acquaint
himself with the aims and hopes of the teachers
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT 1 171
themselves, Fitch seized every opportunity of
attending their conferences. He was present at
the Convention of Head Masters and Assistant
Masters at St. Johns, New Brunswick, at New-
port, and at Chautauqua. The latter place
illustrated for him more than anything else he
saw the spontaneity and unconventionality of
American attempts to extend the sphere and
influence of knowledge. This summer camp on
the shores of Lake Erie, with its heterogeneous
collection of classes and of interests, aroused his
unreserved admiration where it might have merely
challenged cynical criticism. What stirred him
was the unfeigned interest in knowledge which
characterized the whole assemblage, an interest
which might have been pathetic had it not been
at once so confident and so humble. Here were
men from lonely farms, from the workshop,
ministers of religion, whole families enjoying
their summer holiday together, but all inspired
by the same desire to add to their knowledge,
and to penetrate, however perfunctorily, into
that world of thought and larger interests which
lay apart from the ordinary routine of a too
busy life. And here, too, were some of the most
distinguished of American teachers and scholars
ready to share of their best with all comers on
perfectly equal terms. It was an object-lesson
in the helpfulness, the freedom from prejudices
172 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
of either social or intellectual caste, the true
brotherliness, of a great democracy. It made
such an impression on Fitch that, immediately
on his return to England, he wrote an enthusi-
astic description of it for the Nineteenth Century.
The article inspired that veteran enthusiast and
reformer, Dr. Paton, of Nottingham, along with
Dr. Hill, Master of Downing College, Cambridge,
to found the National Home Reading Union.
Dr. Hill's account of the origin and objects of
the Union is so discriminating, and his apprecia-
tion of those elements in Fitch's character which
made him the inspirer of these and similar move-
ments so just, that they may be quoted here.
' My own interest in the National Home Read-
ing Union, or, to speak more correctly, my desire
to see such an organization as this established,
is entirely due to him. In the Nineteenth Century
for October, 1888, Sir Joshua contributed an
article on the Chautauqua Reading Circles, which
set me and many others talking and planning.
How far it served to inspire Dr. Paton to found
the Union I cannot say ; it certainly prepared
the ground. If so broad a scheme for education
of the most popular kind met with such signal
success in America, why had we no similar scheme
on this side the Atlantic ? University Extension
had done excellent work ; but lectures are ex-
pensive. Those of us who had lectured for the
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT 1 173
Extension, and had seen the pleasure and purpose
which this form of instruction brings into thousands
of lives, saw also the opportunity for a more
widely-permeating movement. It must be the
cheapest, most elastic, and most popular of schemes,
suited to the limited experience and limited leisure
of the classes who find University Extension
lectures too great a strain upon their mental
energy ; and at the same time it must supply
the place of lectures in the case of those who,
owing to their isolation or other reasons, find
them inaccessible. Above all, it must be a guild
of readers. It must involve the idea of co-opera-
tion, and bring with it the sense of comradeship
in intellectual pursuits.
' There is nothing easier than to decry popular
culture. Few leader-writers, when ostensibly
extolling movements which have this aim, can
resist the temptation of pointing out that Uni-
versity Extension, the Home Reading Union,
and similar agencies can hardly be said to make
for culture at all, as measured by the writer's
own superior standard. Study (if the word may
be used) of this kind is but scrappy, superficial,
amateur, at the best. The self-complacent
recipient of a little second-hand learning does
not value his acquisitions for their intrinsic
interest. He wears his Brummagem jewels in
order that they may excite the envy of neighbours
174 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
who, having no jewels, either genuine or paste,
mistake these for diamonds of the first water.
Sarcasm directed at this subject is sure to reach
its mark. There is truth in the sneer. Yet it
need not be so limited in its application as the
critic intends. We can imagine the representa-
tive of a truly cultivated people, if such shall
ever arise, alleging that he discovers treason to
learning even amongst our recognised leaders.
It is not only amongst those who have not had
the good fortune to receive a University educa-
tion that the desire to know is less active than
the desire to attain a reputation for knowing.
Of this kind of snobbery Sir Joshua Fitch was
absolutely free. He neither displayed his own
learning nor depreciated the attainments of
others, whether Board school children, training
college students, or artisans. Knowledge and un-
derstanding were talents to search for, however
limited they might be in amount, however humble
their possessors. This may seem but a small
thing to say of him, yet to those who have striven
to raise the general standard of mental attain-
ment it will mean a great deal. At Chautauqua
Sir Joshua Fitch recognised an aspiration towards
a higher intellectual life ; he overlooked the
meaner purpose. In describing what he had
seen he dwelt upon the dignity and significance
of the ceremonies which mark the students' up-
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT 1 175
ward progress. He had the self-restraint to
omit from his description the short-comings or
exaggerations which occasionally convert ceremony
into burlesque. The same sympathetic earnest-
ness distinguished him in all matters of which I
have any experience. He never depreciated
effort. Recognising existing conditions, he planned
to obtain, under them, a slightly better result.
This faculty of looking at things in all their
relations is very rare.
' Reformers are numerous. Numberless are
the men who do not attempt to reform what
they lightly condemn. The honest, earnest spirit
which applauds what is meritorious and consis-
tently strives to give it freer play is not so
common. Sir Joshua looked at the world with
kind eyes. His long experience as one of Her
Majesty's inspectors had taught him to watch
for points worth praise ; praise duly given, every-
one paid attention to his " Here and here you
can do better." It is very difficult to give
specific illustrations of this habit of mind.
Numerous as were the occasions on which, in
my recollection, Sir Joshua Fitch said the right
thing at the right time and in the right way,
checking discursive conversation, bringing the
members of a committee back to the business
in hand and face to face with practicable issues,
such instances will not bear quoting. I can but
176 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
give expression to my own feeling of confidence
in his ripe judgment and great tact, to the satisfac-
tion with which I used to note his presence, and
to the greater responsibility which rests upon me,
now that his help is no longer to be obtained.'
Fitch, indeed, had never more truly found his
role than when he was trafficking as a merchant
of light. Every land he visited was for him a
Land of Promise, and he would never return
from it with empty hands. His friend Matthew
Arnold had written to him on the eve of his
own departure for America : c I don't like going,
I don't like lecturing, I don't like living in
public, and I wish it were all well over. I shall
be glad, however, to see an American common
school with my own eyes.' Fitch did not mind
any of these things. He was conscious of them
only as the necessary incidents of the getting
or the giving of knowledge. He was himself as
ready to give as he was anxious to get. And
America, which held so lightly to the past and
even to the present in its confident readiness to
invade the future, seemed likely to give him
just what he wanted. Arnold had written to
him in a letter of the same period : * I hope that
some day we shall change r61es, and that you
will have my outing to America, and I shall
have yours to Italy.' It marks just the difference
in outlook of the two men the poet and thinker
A MERCHANT OF LIGHT ' 177
whose eyes scanned the present with such clear
and often disappointed scrutiny because they
were naturally lifted to the hills of the highest
human achievement in the past, and the practical
reformer who occasionally visited the hills of the
past to trace the course of the waters that ferti-
lized the plain wherein his hopeful spirit laboured
and rejoiced. Italy pleased Fitch, but America
satisfied him. He could appreciate the dignity
and the beauty of all that remained of what
had once been life, but he revelled in the chaotic
energy of that which was actually alive.
From America he had brought much educa-
tional inspiration. Its experiments in method ; its
use, however crude, of psychology in perfecting
method ; its provision for the development of
technology and practical science ; its * elective J
system of study ; its encouragement of post-grad-
uate research at the Universities all these were
elements in the American system which he thought
might be adapted co English needs, or, in so far
as they had been adapted, might point the way
to their further extension at home. But it was
not only from America that he got useful hints
for the improvement of English education. The
subject of technical instruction was one which
interested him very closely, and it was to France
and Germany that he looked for special guidance
in that field. In October, 1896, he was invited
12
178 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
by the Technical Education Committee of the
Newcastle City Council to report upon the grants
made by it to different institutions in the city for
the promotion of technical education. The report
which he presented in February, 1897, was marked
by all his usual carefulness of inquiry and shrewd-
ness of judgment. One of the objects which he
had most in view in such reports was to secure
that technical instruction, wherever it was given,
might be closely and vitally connected with a
more liberal course of study. It was to his Parisian
experience that he looked for a model of successful
accomplishment in this object. ' Of institutions
with a still more directly practical object ' he
quotes from his own memorandum on the subject
' the Ecole professionelle menagere, in the Rue
Fondary, for girls, and the Ecole Diderot, for
boys, are sufficiently remarkable to justify a brief
description here. Each of them may be regarded
mainly as an apprentice school in which the pupil
is learning the particular art or trade by which he
or she intends to get a living. But neither is a
mere trade school, for intellectual instruction re-
ceives much attention in both. In the girls'
school the day is divided into two parts, the
morning being devoted to the general education
presumably acquired by all the pupils alike, and
the afternoon to the special businesses which they
have respectively chosen. From half-past eight
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT' 179
to half-past eleven the work includes advanced
elementary instruction generally, exercises in
French language and composition, book-keeping,
since French women are very largely employed
in keeping accounts, one foreign language Eng-
lish or German, at the parents' choice and such
practice in drawing or design as has a special
bearing on the trade or employment to which the
pupil is destined. The afternoon of every day is
devoted to the practice, under skilled instruc-
tresses, of millinery, dressmaking, artificial flower
making, embroidery, and other feminine arts.
Orders are received from ladies, and articles are
made and ornamented by the pupils and sold at a
profit.
' In the Ecole Diderot, for youths from thirteen
to sixteen, a similar general plan prevails. There
is an entrance examination, which is practically
competitive. The mornings are spent in the class
or in lecture- rooms, under the care of professors in
language, mathematics, chemistry and physics,
history, geography, design, geometrical and
artistic, and comptabilite. The pupil elects one
foreign language, German or English, at his dis-
cretion. Written reports are also required of
visits to factories, and descriptions with drawings
of machines and instruments. The afternoons
are spent in the workshops. During the first
year a boy visits each of these in turn, gets some
122
180 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
elementary knowledge about tools and their use,
but does not select his metier until the beginning
of the second year. Then, when he has been
helped to discover his own special aptitude, the
choice is before him. There are the forge, the
engine-house, the carpenter's shop, the modelling-
room, the turning lathes, the upholsterers' de-
partment, and the workroom in which instru-
ments of precision are used for making electrical
or other scientific apparatus. When he has
selected one of these, he devotes the afternoons
of the remaining two years of his course to learn-
ing, under a skilled director, the " art or mystery "
of his special craft. In the workshops articles
are made and finished for the market, many of
the desks, forms, and blackboards, for example,
required in the Paris schoolrooms being manu-
factured in the carpenters' department, and in
this way some part of the generous provision
made by the municipality for affording gratuitous
technical instruction is rendered back in the form
of profit.
' The most striking feature of these two great
trade schools is the association in them of general
and special training. There is in them no attempt
to divorce hand-work from head-work, or to treat
the first as a substitute for the second. The girl
who is to be a modiste or a brodeuse is to be that
and something more. The boy who is to be a
A < MERCHANT OF LIGHT' 181
joiner or an engineer is also to know something of
literature and science. It is in this spirit that
manual training appears to me to be finding its
true place in the French schools, not as a new
instrument of education in rivalry with the old,
but as a part of a rounded and coherent system
of discipline, designed to bring into harmony both
the physical and intellectual forces of the student,
and to make them helpful to each other/
Fitch rejoiced over the Act of 1890 by which
the local Customs and Excise duties were allotted
to the County Councils for the promotion of
technical instruction. He regarded it as a neces-
sary addition to the existing provision for national
education. But the burden of his counsel as to the
use of it was always that it might not be made an
excuse or an occasion for the divorce of the head
and the hand, that no art or craft should be
taught apart from an adequate knowledge of the
sciences on which it depended. He repeated his
advice in an excellent speech delivered at a distri-
bution of certificates at the Norwood Technical
Institute in 1898, and again in a paper read before
the Society of Arts and printed in the Society's
journal for July, 1897.
Another scheme which Fitch did more than
anyone else to promote, and in illustrating and
recommending which he again drew on his foreign
experience, was that of schools savings-banks.
182 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
It was not merely from the economic, but espe-
cially from the moral, point of view that he was a
strong and consistent advocate of thrift. The
economic view of the value of thrift may suffer
change, but the moral considerations which
weighed with Fitch remain. He held that the
right use of money was one of the most intimate
and universal tests of character, and the training
in its right use one of the most potent and gener-
ally applicable instruments in making character.
His attention was called to a scheme with this
object in view inaugurated in the communal
schools of Ghent by M. Laurent, a professor in
the University of that city. He visited Ghent
and other Belgian towns where the experiment
had been tried, and in 1874 wrote an account of
it in Macmillaris Magazine. He quoted with
evident conviction of their applicability to our own
case M. Laurent's fine words : ' Les besoins factices
sont la plaie et la malediction de la richesse,' and
he did not hesitate to add that such needs are
not unknown among the poor, and that of poverty,
too, they may be an unsuspected plague-spot and
curse. At any rate, it was as a training in the
unselfish use of money, in thought about and
the sense of responsibility for its use, that he
desired to see thrift urged upon the young on
the very threshold of life. The schools savings-
banks which he did so much to establish in the
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT' 183
elementary schools of England have not, perhaps,
had all the success he could have desired, but at
least they have done something towards the forma-
tion of wiser and worthier habits of life.
But it was not only examples for imitation that
as a merchant of light he brought from overseas ;
it was also warnings as to possible dangers which
ought to be avoided. When the Education Bill
of 1896, with its daring scheme of decentraliza-
tion by transferring so much of the purely educa-
tional control of the Education Department over
the schools to local authorities, seemed likely
to become law, Fitch pointed warningly to the
' awful example ' of America. That was just, as
he claimed, one of the points of unquestioned
superiority in the existing English system over the
American. American education is entirely in the
hands of the individual State or municipal autho-
rities that is to say, it is entirely local. The
Government of the United States has no part
whatever in the education of the country beyond
the maintenance of a Bureau of Education, with-
out even the power of imposing regulations or
principles of action upon the Legislature of any
State, with, indeed, no function beyond that of
collecting statistics, which, however useful they
might be, and occasionally are, are too seldom
turned to profitable account. The result of this
purely local system is that, while in a few of the
184 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
older, richer, or more populous States education
was a matter of as anxious public concern, and
was as thoroughly developed, as in the older coun-
tries of Europe, yet in perhaps the majority of
the newer States the period of school attendance
was absurdly brief, the teaching of an inferior
quality, and the public interest in education un-
trustworthy. With his usual shrewd and just
appreciation of varying national circumstances,
he was also able to point out that in practice the
evil results of such a system in a new country
like America were neither so apparent nor so real
as they must be in England. The immense
energy of the people, with its innumerable outlets
in a rich and undeveloped country, with the vivid
interest it gives to life, in itself atones for an
imperfect preparatory education. Besides, in such
a country men who begin to make their way have
everywhere at hand the means of supplementing
their imperfect initial equipment, and do not fail
to use them. The American may not. sooner or
later, have acquired much knowledge, but at least
he is always acquiring it. But in England the
defects of the initial preparation are not likely to
be atoned for or repaired. And it is just those
defects which would be the inevitable result of
any relaxation of the central authority on at least
the purely educational side of the management of
the schools of the nation.
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT' 185
In the long-drawn-out controversy on the ques-
tion of religious education in elementary schools
which has raged intermittently since 1894, Fitch
bore his part. It was naturally not the part of
heated zealots on either side, whose least interest
in the controversy was educational. Yet it
happened to be the part of uncompromising
opposition to the claims of what is known as
the Church party, but what was really, according
to Fitch, who had some knowledge behind his
opinion, a party composed of one section of the
clergy of the National Church and of a handful
of laymen. He contributed article after article
on this subject to the leading reviews between
1894 and 1902, all of them based on an impartial
scrutiny of the facts, and all of them contending
for an unhesitating rejection of the proposed
measures. Indeed, he was by far the most
powerful and influential opponent of the various
proposals of the Government (the views and
unauthorized suggestions of the thousands of
newspaper legislators never stirred him to com-
ment) during those years. He had but one
motive in every line he wrote upon this question
his desire that religious education, to which he
attached an absolute value as an integral portion
of the school education of every child in the
nation, might be preserved. Here, again, he
referred his countrymen to France and America
186 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
for examples of what was to be avoided in the
solution of the religious question in the schools.
He held that the educational systems of both
these countries had been weakened by their
exclusively secular character ; that the weakness
of the French system had revealed itself in the
necessity which the Church felt was imposed
upon her by the existence of the secular State
school of establishing a rival and hostile school
in nearly every commune by its side ; while the
weakness of the American system betrayed itself in
a virtual violation, in many cases, of the secular
character of the schools, and, in spite of the in-
tense devotion of America to the common school
system, in the possibility, even likelihood, of a
coming indictment of this particular aspect of it.
In England he believed that, with common-
sense and something of that give and take which
accorded so well with the national temper, there
was no need for such a menace ever to arise.
Through the circumstances of the growth of the
national system of education, a sufficient, and,
besides, the only practicable, religious education
of all the children in the schools had been secured.
In the schools of the National Church a religious
education authorized by the Church was given
by its own teachers to its own children. In most
of the Board schools throughout the country a
course of religious teaching such as that prescribed
A < MERCHANT OF LIGHT' 187
by the London School Board prevailed. This
teaching was simple and practical, and was
founded upon a study of the most devotional
parts of the Bible refracted through that
minimum of dogmatic conception which is the
common medium of their religious faith for prac-
tically all English laymen. It was, besides, given
by teachers who could teach, who understood the
mind and character of children, who in nearly
all cases believed in their religion arid conceived
of it through the simple theology of the ordinary
layman, who undertook the Scripture lesson in
a spirit of earnestness and reverence and with
a deep sense of its value to the educational work
of the school and to the formation of the children's
character, and who, finally, had been most of
them trained in the colleges of the Church.
This priceless privilege of the common English
school, permanently guaranteed by long usage
and accepted gratefully by the vast majority of
the people, was, it seemed to Fitch, about to be
wantonly endangered for the sake of proposals
which had not the slightest chance of being
carried, and which, if they were, would destroy
the moral even more than the formal discipline
of the school, would place the religious instruction
in the hands of persons of whose capacity for
teaching children there was no guarantee, and
would rob the responsible teacher of one of his
188 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
most influential and most highly-prized privileges.
He held that the real danger of these proposals
was that either a protracted agitation in favour
of them, or the chance of their being carried in
some moment of despair of a wearied and worried
Legislature, would provoke a passionate and irre-
sistible national demand for purely secular educa-
tion in the State schools wholly alien to the
normal desire of the English people. It was to
avert this disaster that he fought so courageously
and persistently for the established state of things.
His exposure of the hollowness of the arguments
by which these proposals were supported was, of
course, genial and good-natured, but it was also
relentless. When their upholders posed as cham-
pions of the rights of the parents, he reminded
them that the parents were apparently entirely
unsuspicious that their rights had been infringed,
and confidently asserted that, even if these sup-
posed rights were restored to them, they would
never think, if left to themselves, of claiming
them. And he twitted these champions of the
rights of poor parents with neglecting to enforce
their own exactly similar rights where they were
at perfect liberty to do so. For, he reminded
them, they allowed their own sons and daughters
to receive in schools of their own choice, and
supported, for the most part, by their own pay-
ments, a religious education of exactly the same
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT 1 189
kind as that against which they were clamouring
in the State-aided elementary schools.
Fitch was, indeed, like most of the educational
officials of a past day, and with more conviction
than most of them, the truest friend of the
voluntary schools. He liked variety of type in
the educational system of the country ; he valued,
and did his best to foster, local interest in and
local sacrifice for the cause of education ; and he
thought it right that the Church, which had
shown so much of that interest and endured so
much of that sacrifice, should continue to enjoy
the privilege of teaching its own children in its
own schools. But he saw that the recent trend
of legislation was slowly but surely robbing her
of the last remains of right to that privilege.
He saw that measures like the abolition of school
fees, and the special aid grant, and, still more
recently, the imposition of the full charge of
school maintenance upon the ratepayers, in gradu-
ally reducing the amount of voluntary subscrip-
tions, were also removing both the evidence and
the fact of ioca! interest and sacrifice, and were,
therefore, annulling the justification of the con-
tinued control of schools by unrepresentative
persons. It was because he saw this process of
gradual destruction of the voluntary schools
going on, by the very means on which their
supporters relied for their continued existence,
190 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
that he desired so much to see that working
arrangement for the continuance of religious
education, which had grown up since 1870,
generally accepted. It would secure that, when
all the schools were at last brought under the
management of the ratepayers' representatives, a
simple and universal scheme of religious teaching
suited to the capacities of children, and capable
of being supplemented by the pastoral care of
the churches, should prevail. There was no
object for which Fitch, with his deeply religious
nature, fought harder or was ready to sacrifice
more.
One more instance of the way in which he
could learn from foreign experience may be given.
It is an excellent example of how his shrewd
wisdom could detect the truth underlying conflict-
ing evidence where a less penetrating mind would
have been imposed upon by the mere superficial
appearances and confused by their contradictori-
ness. His report on the working of the free-school
system in America, France, and Belgium was
drawn up with a view to the introduction of
the measure which practically abolished fees in
English elementary schools. One of the questions
on which legislators needed information was, what
would be the probable effect upon attendance of
a free system ? Would free education do away
with the necessity of a vigilant and vigorous
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT ' 191
exercise of the right of the State to compel
attendance in its schools ? In America, where
compulsion was repellent to the republican in-
stincts and sentiments of the people, and where,
therefore, attendance was not legally enforced,
it was fitful and unsatisfactory. In France, on
the other hand, where attendance was legally
enforceable, it was so generally satisfactory that
the need of compulsion was of the slightest.
Fitch's interpretation of this conflicting evidence
is an admirable essay in the comparative psy-
chology of nations. * There is in France,' he says,
' a longer tradition [than in England] among the
working classes in favour of education for their
children. It is rare for a parent, in any rank
of life, to be content to see his children brought
up more ignorant than himself; and when in
any country a system has existed long enough
to produce one instructed generation of parents,
legal compulsion, except in a few cases, becomes
unnecessary. Moreover, democracy in France
differs essentially in the manner of its manifesta-
tion from that of America. It does not take the
form of self-assertion in regard to such a matter
as the education of children, nor look upon the
authority of the State, in this particular, as
intrusive or objectionable. Compulsory laws, as
we have seen, are alien to the habits and
feelings of American citizens. They exist to a
192 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
very limited extent in the States of the Union,
and when they exist they are seldom enforced.
But in France they are in harmony alike with
the instincts and with the interests of the people ;
and :n the long history of revolutionary and
governmental changes, one fails to find any ex-
pression of impatience or any sense of grievance
on the part of the working classes in relation to
the laws and usages which require the regular
attendance of children at school. In France, as
in Germany and Switzerland, in Sweden and
Denmark, the peasant and the ouvrier have
learned to identify the success of their children
in life with the possession of a good education,
and, therefore, to acquiesce cheerfully in the
maintenance of the obligatory law/ The lesson
for us was so obvious that he did not stay to
enforce it. Since, happily, the method of com-
pulsion is possible of application in England, let
us use :"t for the one o: 1 two generations which
will make its use no longer necessary.
It was ir this spirit and with this nigh measure
of capacity that Fitch discharged his duties as a
* merchant of light.' Wherever he went he gained
much, and perhaps he gave as much. As we have
seen, h?s influence over the teaching world of
America was unbounded. In France, too, his
name was highly respected. There was something
of secret sympathy binding him to the high
A 'MERCHANT OF LIGHT' 193
intelligence and the clear reason of that great
nation. He had no greater pleasure when in Paris
than in attending the lectures at the College de
France or the Sorbonne. He longed to see his
own University attempt something of the same kind
for London. The measure of success which has
attended recent experiments in this direction would
no doubt have delighted him. But he would have
been very bold and asked for more. It was
fortunate for the English Education Office that
it had at its moment of greatest and most critical
activity such a capable servant to report to it
upon the general movement of education beyond
our shores. It was fortunate for the English
nation that, in the forging of its educational
machinery, it could command a craftsman of the
greatest skill, of the widest knowledge, and of
indefatigable industry.
13
CHAPTER VII
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS
WHEN the Fitches came back to London in 1870,
they took up their residence at 5, Lancaster
Terrace, Regent's Park. There they remained
till after Fitch's retirement from official life, when
they removed to 13, Leinster Square. At Lan-
caster Terrace they were within easy distance of
many old friends and of the institutions in which
they were specially interested, like University
College and Bedford College. Miss Anna Swan-
wick was near at hand in Cumberland Terrace.
Fitch was attracted by her vigorous mind, her
literary tastes, and her active interest in all
reforming movements. She in turn admired in
him the public servant in whom thought and
work, zeal and wisdom, were so happily wedded,
but, above all, the consistent and chivalrous advo-
cate of the free admission of women to all the
privileges and responsibilities of the common life.
When, in 1890, a committee was formed to present
Fitch with his portrait in memory of his services
194
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 195
to the cause of the higher education of women,
it was Miss Swanwick who was chosen to express
their gratitude. No one could have done it
better than she, for no one shared more com-
pletely Fitch's conception of education as the
deliberate and various organization of life.
Fitch lived in his work, and every form of work
which was ever so remotely connected with his
manifold intellectual interests became his by an
instinctive appropriation. He would seek it out,
measure its scope and effect, interest himself in all
those who were engaged in it. There was no
important forward movement of his time which
he did not in this way make peculiarly his own.
For most men such variety of interest might have
resulted in a dissipation of energy. For him it
was itself the natural and orderly expression of a
strongly concentrated energy. He cared about
so many things because he saw them all as parts
of an ideal whole for which he was consistently
working. Sir Robert Hunter, in an article in the
Contemporary Review for December, 1903, happily
described this inspiration which gave force and
meaning to all that Fitch did. ' Sir Joshua
Fitch/ he says, ' had always the inspiration of a
great cause, that of so organizing the means of
instruction in England that every child shall have
the best chances of developing the faculties which
it inherits, and of tilling that position in the
132
196 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
community for which it is best adapted. In this
cause Sir Joshua was an enthusiast, and in its
advocacy and in his daily labour for its promotion
he found that stimulus which kept his faculties at
full stretch, and that pleasure which attends the
hope of far-reaching results.' It was into this
general plan that all his special interests fitted,
and he knew how to advise in the special case
because he saw so clearly the needs of the whole.
No one was ever so ready as he to attend meet-
ings, sit on committees, deliver a lecture to some
obscure society, because in doing any of these
things he knew that he was contributing, and
exactly the measure in which he was contributing,
to a general end.
It was especially after his retirement from
official life that he found opportunities for this
kind of service. At an age when most men
would have regarded the release from official duty
as the due term of a life of action he continued
his work exactly as if nothing had happened.
The work remained much the same both in its
nature and in its extent. Only the manner of
doing it had changed. And even the method
changed but little. He continued, for instance,
to write freely upon all the educational questions
which were being publicly discussed during the
last nine years of his life. And the pen of the
independent critic differed but little from the pen
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 197
of the official public servant. During his official
life he had never hesitated to speak his whole
mind with perfect freedom, so that retirement did
not mean for him a recovery of independence,
Nor, on the other hand, had he any tendency to
yield to that craze for excessive and irritating
frankness which occasionally marks the enfran-
chised official. On the contrary, in the freedom
of unofficial life he spoke his mind with all sin-
cerity indeed, but also with all due respect for
the responsible authority whose policy he had so
long helped to mould and direct. Nothing more
clearly revealed his humility and self-effacement
for the sake of work than the fact that he did
not use the years of his retirement in writing
some permanent and authoritative contribution to
the literature of education by which his name
would have been remembered. He had the
knowledge, he had the literary skill, he had the
delight of a true craftsman in the literary art.
But he had trained himself all his life long to
treat the pen as an occasional instrument in
advancing a practical cause. And he continued
to use it for that purpose only. He devoted the
whole of his time in retirement to the practical
claims of the cause which he had made his
own. In so far as the pen could serve the
cause, he used it. In so far as it could be
better served in other ways, he turned to them
198 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
with perfect contentment and singleness of
purpose.
It would be impossible to enumerate the ser-
vices, public and private, which Fitch rendered
to the cause of education, either in its technical
sense or in that wider sense which was his own,
during the last nine years of his life. A few,
however, must be mentioned, if only as charac-
teristic of the laborious days he lived to the end.
In January, 1895, he was appointed by Mr. Shaw
Lefevre a member of the Departmental Com-
mittee ' to inquire into the existing systems for
the maintenance and education of children under
the charge of managers of district schools and
Boards of Guardians in the Metropolis, and to
advise as to any changes that may be desirable.'
His friend Mr. Mundella had written to him
some weeks before : ' I am satisfied that a report
from you upon these schools would be a great
national advantage. The opportunity is too good
and too important to be lost, and I should be
grateful to you if you would confer with me
upon it.' Fitch's work upon the Committee was
marked by his usual zeal and thoroughness. He
visited most of the Poor Law schools in or near
London, as well as the cottage homes at Bir-
mingham and Sheffield. His examination of the
state of these schools convinced him that their
educational control would be more effectively
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 199
entrusted to the Education Department, and he
strongly urged that they should be subject to the
ordinary inspection of elementary schools. He
was, therefore, not altogether satisfied with the
report of the Committee, which, as usual with such
reports, was somewhat of a compromise.
When Lord Spencer was at the Admiralty, he
nominated Fitch as one of the members of a small
Committee to inquire into the working of the
naval and dockyard schools. It opened up to
him a new aspect of the educational problem, and
brought him into contact with men of a very
different training and experience from his own.
He liked both the work and the men, and when
the report was completed his colleagues devolved
upon him the duty of drafting it. The Rev. J. C.
Cox-Edwardes, Rector of Ecton, Northampton-
shire, who was one of his colleagues as the then
Chaplain of the Fleet, thus writes of him :
1 When associated with Sir Joshua Fitch on a
committee to inquire into the management and
working of the Royal Marine and Royal Dockyard
Schools, one was at all times impressed not only
by his ability and by his earnestness in all matters
connected with education, but by his absolute
honesty in all he said and did. One admired the
patience and courtesy with which he so readily
listened to the opinions of others when they
differed from his own ; and one could not help
200 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
feeling that his final decision was not made
without giving due weight to all that might be
said.
' A good deal of sentiment and tradition had
grown up in connection with the management of
these service schools ; it was a pleasure to see
how tender he was towards all this, and how
careful to avoid recommending any changes which
would seem likely to do violence to those tradi-
tions and that sentiment.
' It was at all times a real pleasure to be with
him, not only in hours of business, but in social
intercourse, for nothing seemed to ruffle him, and
he was always genial and full of a quiet humour.'
This report had not yet been presented when, in
January, 1895, the Lords of the Admiralty ap-
pointed another Committee * to consider whether
Greenwich Hospital School should be placed under
the inspection of the Education Department.'
Fitch was nominated on this Committee also, and
it was owing to his advice that the Department
undertook the inspection of the school. It was
another triumph for his ideal of a national test of
the value of every form of national education.
But random Commissions from Government
Departments were not enough to occupy his time
or his energy. His later years remind one of the
spontaneous zeal of those immediate successors
of the Apostles in the Early Church who were
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 201
itinerant bishops and evangelists in one. He
constituted himself at once a propagandist of the
educational faith in all its details, and an overseer
of all the schools at least, of all within his reach.
Miss Latham, Principal of St. Mary's College,
Paddington, writes of him : ' When we first came
to St. Mary's College, in January, 1901, Sir
Joshua was most kind in every way. I had
met him in old days at the Ladies' College at
Cheltenham, but there was no special reason why
he should help us in our work, which presented
very grave difficulties. For that reason we valued
all the more Sir Joshua's kindness to us as a
college in coming several times in the midst of all
his engagements to lecture to our students on
the National Gallery and the National Portrait
Gallery. Those who were able to avail them-
selves of the further pleasure of visiting the
National Gallery with him will not forget all that
he helped them to see in the pictures. For my-
self, I may perhaps add how deeply I shall always
value the sympathy and help given so generously
in the most difficult days of our work in the
training of teachers. There were many reasons
why this sympathy might have been withheld,
but it was given fully and freely.' It may be
safely asserted that to Fitch himself there never
were any reasons powerful enough to induce him
to withhold his sympathy from any capable and
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
conscientious effort to make the work of teaching
real. However little he might sympathize with
the accidental constitution of particular educa-
tional foundations, it was enough that they were
doing the work of teaching well to secure for them
the full measure of his interest and support. For
him there was no distinction between school and
school save such as was marked by their com-
parative excellence in method and skill in work.
Nor was there any distinction in the service he
rendered as a public official and as an independent
authority on all educational matters. The one
form of service was never formal because pre-
scribed, nor the other casual because voluntary.
Few things delighted Fitch more than the
opportunity of teaching others about his favourite
subjects. He not only taught others to teach, but
loved to teach himself. There was something
strangely inspiring in the readiness of one who
had fulfilled a long career of public service and
was approaching his eightieth year to leave his
fireside on a cold winter evening for the purpose
of lecturing in some dingy room to a little group
of people who were making some humble attempts
after self-culture. Yet he never refused such
invitations, save when other engagements made
it impossible to accept them, and then only with
sincere regret. In the last months of his life he
struggled through a London fog after dinner to
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS
deliver his lecture on the National Portrait
Gallery to a literary society, humble in its aims
and insignificant in its numbers, which met in
a cold and dreary schoolroom in Paddington
Green. He had delivered the same society's
inaugural lecture the winter before on ' The Value
of Literature in a Business Life.' It was the same
delightful lecture, full of a serene wisdom and of
happy estimates of his favourite authors, which
he had delivered years before to the thousands
assembled at Chautauqua. He probably enjoyed
the attempt to arouse an interest in literature
among forty or fifty of his working-class neigh-
bours as much as the meed of acclamation with
which the American multitudes received him. He
had a real pride in our great art collections, and
an immense sense of their educational value for
London. He never gave a lecture on the National
Galleries without offering his services as a guide
to those who might desire to visit one or other of
them in his company. He was always ready to
devote his Saturday afternoons to this work, which
he regarded as one of the pleasantest recreations
of his busy days.
Perhaps no single enterprise of his later years
enlisted so much of his thought and care as did
the establishment of St. Paul's Girls' School under
the great foundation of Dean Colet. It appealed
both to his imagination and to his sense of justice
204 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
that the girls of London should at last share in
one of the greatest and most famous educational
foundations of the past, and that there should
be at least one girls' school in England whose
revenues would enable it to rival, both in the
range and in the quality of its teaching, some
of the best public schools for boys. When at last
the scheme was successfully launched, he gave
the closest attention to the selection of a site and
the choice of an architect. One of his favourite
afternoon recreations was to go down to Brook
Green from time to time to watch the progress of
the building. There was something delightfully
fresh and childlike in the pleasure which he found
in the promise of great things which he could
never see fulfilled. He was appointed one of the
committee to choose the head mistress. But
he did not live to see the opening of the school
which was the crown of all his lifelong hope and
labour for the education of girls. The present
Bishop of Bristol, who, as a representative of
the University of Cambridge on the Board of
Governors of St. Paul's School, was Fitch's
colleague during the years in which the project
of the girls' school was being carried through,
thus describes his labours on its behalf, as well as
his general work as a Governor :
1 It is a pleasure to be allowed to write a few
words about my friend Sir Joshua Fitch.
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 205
' Of his great influence in educational affairs
it is quite unnecessary for me to speak. He is a
part, and no small part, of the history of primary
education in England in the past and passing
generation. He and I did not take at all the
same view of the treatment of the religious
element in education ; but he was one of those
rather rare men in whose company it is possible,
and indeed easy, to leave out of sight a whole
compartment of difference of opinion, with abun-
dant scope left for hearty agreement.
' It was in his work as one of the elected
Governors of St. Paul's School that I saw most
of him. He represented the University of London,
as I did the University of Cambridge. From the
very first I found myself in complete agreement
with him in that most important work. The
position of the University Governors was, and is,
a very responsible one. The Company Governors
namely, the master, wardens, and selected
members of the Mercers' Company outnumber
the nine representatives of Oxford, Cambridge,
and London, as in my judgment it is right that
they should. But I never knew a clear opinion
of the University Governors overridden by the
Company's majority. There never, in my time,
was a separation into two camps, nor was even
a tendency in that direction perceptible. It
seemed to me sometimes that almost too much
206 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
respect was paid to the opinions which some of us
on the part of the Universities expressed. I am
inclined to attribute a great deal of this singularly
happy state of things to Fitch's influence. He
was so kindly, so courteous, so clear in his argu-
ments, so full of common-sense and simplicity in
combination with a keen insight, so eminently
anxious to give at least full weight to the
argument of an opponent, that he naturally kept
discussion and good - temper at a high level.
I should like to take this opportunity of saying
that he and I frequently spoke in private, with
gratitude and admiration, of the charming treat-
ment we all of us received from the succession of
able and experienced men who represented the
Company on the Governing Body.
' There were, during the period of our joint
tenure of office, two grave questions, to which
continuous attention was given. The one was
the great question of the amount of income
from Dean Colet's endowments which should
be placed at the disposal of the Governors each
year, including the question of the application
of the surplus. The other was the question of
establishing a girls' school which should rank as
high in women's education as St. Paul's School does
in the education of men. On the former point feel-
ings ran very high. There was for a considerable
period of time a real danger that the Charity Com-
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 207
missioners would cut the Governors down to a
small number of thousands a year, and apply the
large remainder to education lower than the
highest. Fitch was firmly set against this, and
many a plan he and I have devised for making
our opposition effective. In the end the efforts of
the whole body of Governors were completely
successful, and mischief, which it is impossible to
estimate at its full danger, was averted. No one
played a higher part in the fight than my peaceful
friend Fitch. Of the other matter it is not too
much to say that he, more than anyone else, kept on
pegging away, regardless of difficulties and delays,
good-temperedly pressing on and keeping the
ultimate goal clearly before the eyes of his
colleagues. Before he passed away he knew that
the victory was won and was complete. Every-
one wished that he had lived to attend the
auspicious opening of the girls' school at Brook
Green a few weeks ago.
' A grateful companion of his in some parts
of his work for the St. Paul's Schools is of opinion
that to no one man more than to Sir Josh ua Fitch
is the now assured independence of position of
St. Paul's School, and the actual existence of the
girls' school at Brook Green in full life, to be
counted as due.'
But Fitch was not satisfied with being
the apostle and evangelist of his educational
208 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
faith. By some silent but unanimous vote
he had been appointed a kind of educational
consul-general for all strangers who came to our
shores in search of knowledge. And he never
thought of declining the task which had been
thus imposed upon him. Nothing gave him
greater pleasure than to know that people
wanted to learn anything that he could teach
them, or to find that they wanted help which he
could give. One was always siire to meet at his
house men from all parts of the world a professor
from some American University, a student from
India or Japan, a Frenchman or German studying
some phase of our national life. And it was not
only men of distinction who found the welcome of
his kindly face and his richly-stored mind. He
paid just as much attention to the rawest youth
whom some friend had commended to his interest
and assistance. Indeed, he loved the young with
their generous enthusiasms, and remained himself
till the last as young and as generous-minded
as any of them. Of his help to Indian students
in this country, the late Miss Manning, who
worked indefatigably for many years as honorary
secretary of the National Indian Association,
wrote :
' Among the many illustrations of Sir Joshua
Fitch's kindliness, I like to remember the friendly
interest that he showed to Indian students in
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 209
London, especially to those who came to England
with the object of learning about our educational
institutions. He was always ready to supply
the desired information, or, through introductions,
to enable them to visit colleges and schools. Sir
Joshua's volume of Lectures on Teaching, de-
livered at Cambridge, has been widely circu-
lated in India, and one Bombay schoolmaster told
me that he had presented a copy to each of his
assistants. His name was, therefore, already
familiar to many Indian students, and, if he could
have visited their country, he would have certainly
received a very cordial welcome.
1 In October, 1896, Sir Joshua Fitch presided
at a lecture given by Professor S. Satthian-
adhar, M.A., of Madras, at the Imperial Institute,
the subject being ' What has English Education
done for India ?' In his opening speech he dwelt
on the great difficulties connected with the
adapting of Western educational methods to
the peculiar character and traditions of the people
of India. Questions as to success in this direction
must constantly occur to responsible officials in
that country, and thus, Sir Joshua observed, the
present system could only be considered experi-
mental. In saying that experience would indicate
some modifications he predicted what has actually
happened, for the recent Universities Commission
in India was appointed in order to inquire into
14
210 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
several defects in the educational system which
had been disclosed by time, and to suggest
effectual remedies/
The same kind of generous aid he extended to
those French students and professors of the Ecole
Normale, elected to the free travelling scholar-
ships awarded by their Government to promote
the knowledge of foreign languages and insti-
tutions, who chose England as the land of their
educational pilgrimage. Fitch had made the
acquaintance of M. Bonet-Maury (the successor
of Auguste Sabatier as Dean of the Protestant
Faculty of Theology in Paris), at the London
Health and Education Exhibition of 1884, and
learned from him the scope and purpose of the
scheme of travelling scholarships inaugurated the
year before by M. Jules Ferry. M. Bonet-Maury
says : ' It was impossible that a mind so open and
progressive as Sir Joshua's should fail to recognise
the bearing of the scheme upon the work of civili-
zation. When I had the honour of being pre-
sented to him, and of discussing with him this
work of international education, he showed the
liveliest interest in it, and promised me his co-
operation. It was not, indeed, easy, without the
help of those who held high educational positions
in Great Britain, to place our countrymen in the
training colleges, or to arrange for their presence
at the lessons given in the grammar schools. It
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS
was owing to the recommendation of Sir Joshua,
then Inspector of Training Colleges, that our
young women teachers were introduced into the
training colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and
at Cheltenham, and our men into the colleges at
Battersea, Isle worth, Westminster, and Exeter,
and at Edinburgh and Glasgow. They were
everywhere welcomed and encouraged in their
studies by the principals of the colleges. Each
time they passed through London they called
upon Sir Joshua, who received them with his
charming kindness, and shared with them the
fruits of his consummate educational experience.
Many of these professors, who have since become
directors of training colleges, professors of English,
or newspaper writers, bear grateful testimony to
his kindness, and confess that he exercised a
fruitful influence on the development of their
character and their power as teachers. It was in
recognition of these services that the Government
of the Republic nominated him to be a Chevalier
of the Legion of Honour. For myself, whom he
had honoured with his friendship, I can hardly
express the high opinion which I formed of him.
Sir Joshua Fitch was, to my mind, the type of
the perfect gentleman, of the English Liberal, and
of the ideal educator. He was of the stock of
the Arnolds and the Gladstones, and the knight-
hood which he received from Queen Victoria was
142
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
only the public consecration of the nobility of his
character and the superiority of his intellect.'
No notice, however brief, of Fitch's various
energy during these later years of his life can
afford to leave out of account his admirable
thought and work in the cause of public charity.
To him it was a part, and certainly not the least
important part, of a sound national economy, and
therefore of a worthy ideal of national education.
As far back as December, 1869, he contributed
a trenchant article on the subject to Fraser's
Magazine. A pioneer in so many things, he was
here, too, perhaps unconsciously, a pioneer in
the conceptions of public charity, at once more
scientific and more humane, which have grown
up in recent years. The Fraser article outlined
the main principles and methods of the Charity
Organization Society, and though that Society
was in existence some months before the article
was published, Fitch does not seem to have
known anything of its work at the time. It
was after his retirement that he devoted himself
with his usual thoroughness and zeal to its service.
He was attracted to it partly, no doubt, by the
fact that his niece, Miss Pickton, had long been
one of its most interested and untiring workers.
But its businesslike methods and its sense of the
effect of all administration of charity upon char-
acter the character both of those who gave and
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS
of those who received appealed to all that was
most characteristic in his own view of life. During
the year that he presided over its Council he
visited most of the committees in London, and
made himself thoroughly acquainted with their
work. But it will be best to leave the account
of his connection with the Society to the man
who is best able to estimate it. Mr. C. S. Loch
writes :
' You ask me to write a few lines about Sir
Joshua Fitch, and I gladly note down some
thoughts about him, and some reminiscences of
his manner of regarding problems and questions in
which we had a common interest. I knew him
only in the latter years of his life, at least with the
intimacy that comes of comparatively frequent
meetings and casual discussions. He was then
soon to retire from his work in the Education
Office, and was to have more leisure for other
things, though education in one form or another
remained his chief interest, and his experience
and conclusions in regard to it coloured and
influenced his thought respecting many other
subjects on which it was the duty of some of us
to take counsel and to decide as the years went
by. The circle of questions that touch on " charity
organization," some social, some religious, some
educational, represents the range of opinions,
projects, hopes, and apprehensions which were
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
most frequently discussed by us, sometimes in
set debate, more often familiarly and intermittently.
And in regard to these his position, the position
acquired by him in a life of public service and
constant self-education, was that of " a kind of
natural magistrate " and counsellor.
' He had, indeed, in social questions something
more than the experience of many of the active
and intellectual men of his generation. He had
himself seen the wasteful slothfulness of bad
administration as an inspector of endowed schools.
He had seen it on two sides the educational and
the charitable. On both he often found it a
meaningless routine, in which personal and selfish
interests prevailed over the common good. On
the other hand, he had measured the immense
force of local tradition, which, as local patriotism,
might serve the parish with as good a spirit as
it might serve the country, or, unsupervised
and unprovoked to good works, might become
merely obstructive and unreasonable. Hence,
partly by experience and partly, it may be, by
temperament, he was, like Sir Stafford Northcote
and his colleagues upon the great Friendly
Societies Commission of 1874, a believer not
only in administrative control and inspection,
and the supervision that comes both of official
report and of personal conference, but also in
the preservation of a certain spontaneity and
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 215
spring in those on whom the duties of administra-
tion or of education devolve locally and at first
hand.
1 Hence, by inference we may say of him that,
as with many of his generation, administration
seemed to him largely itself a question of educa-
tion, and any proposal that seemed likely to
lessen the intellectual scope and energy of the
individual was, in his judgment, on the ground of
its ultimate effect on the people, to be scrutinized
with particular severity and with a qualified
mistrust. This, indeed, was a distinctive trait,
and it was based on a principle which, with many
of that generation, was at the root of all sugges-
tion and all comment in public affairs. It was,
they thought, better to regulate than to centralize.
It was good to have a curriculum or to have
regulations ; but, in teaching, the real want was
activity of mind in the teacher an activity that
would take the pupil from books to observation,
from prose to poetry, that would make the pupil's
mind in its turn an active, apprehensive organism,
not content with being taught or having learned,
but, out of the sheer spontaneity of its own
interests, stimulated to teach itself. So, in ad-
ministering, the real want was a similar activity,
so that, as, in self-help and thrift, public or other
subsidies to institutions or individuals might
smother their natural fire, that fire should be
216 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
kindled rather, stirred and fed by the incitements
that are found in life and grow out of it love
of parents and friends, the realization of the
responsibilities of life, the provision of better
opportunities for self-maintenance. So, further,
on the main lines of administration, whatever
the special department might be, he would argue
that the gift that weakened discrimination and
effort killed, just as the letter of edict and regula-
tion also killed, killed or slowly starved the better
life, and that the whole end of administration
was the creation of a larger mental force in the
individual and in the community ; and part of
that mental force was a quickened and reasonable
sympathy.
' I write all this, of course, in my own words.
He would, perhaps, have expressed what I mean
somewhat differently. I think of him as one
of a group of men who, in their various ways,
helped to reform the social life of England, and
out of their own experience drew conclusions
which many of a younger generation may, with
a lesser or a different experience, be inclined to
reject, but whom, if I had to write their
biographies, I should class together as men (and
one might include women too) who, in spite of
many differences, had this broad, distinctive social
belief in common and left it to us as their heritage.
'In 1898-1899 Sir Joshua Fitch was chairman
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS
of the council of the Society, and some of his
speeches about that time illustrate his manner
of regarding questions of charity organization.
' When he became chairman of council he
turned inspector on his own account, and, to
see what the work of the Society was in detail,
with what care and in what spirit it was done,
he visited district committees and attended their
meetings ; and part of his speech at the close
of his year of office, was an account of his inspec-
tion. This was characteristic. Not less so was
his statement of the scientific nature of charitable
work :
' " There is a cluster of buildings arranged round
the quadrangle of Burlington House which have
been placed by the Government at the disposal
of various societies for the promotion of science.
There are the Linnsean, the Chemical, the Astro-
nomical, the Geological, and others. The members
of each of these are engaged in the investigation
of truth in some one special department of intel-
lectual or practical activity ; but although those
departments differ in range, the methods pursued
in them are practically the same in all. There
is, first, the careful collection of facts, the sifting
and verifying them ; then a refusal to generalize
while the data for arriving at principles are
incomplete ; and more than this, a readiness to
listen to new experience such as may require
218 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
even the best of general principles to be absorbed
and superseded by something larger and better
than itself. On such conditions only does any
body of truths, whether in chemistry, biology,
or botany, become entitled to the name of science,
and hope to make a real advance in human know-
ledge. And the Charity Organization Society,
concerned as it is mainly in the discovery of
such truths and principles as bear upon the wise
administration of charity, is bound in like manner
to conduct its investigations in a scientific spirit,
to watch carefully the working of new experiments,
to note carefully their successes and their failures,
and to find out why they succeed or why they
fail."
1 And so on another occasion :
' " The administration of charity is a fine art ;
perhaps it would be stricter to say an inductive
science the science of settling rules and principles
before putting them in action. Every physical
science begins with facts, with making experi-
ments, making the best use of such suggestions
as experience offers, and by taking the successes
and failures especially the failures gradually
arriving at general principles, which, however
valuable as generalizations, will, by larger expe-
rience, be absorbed and superseded by something
still better, and thus eventually something like
permanent principles of action will be arrived at."
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 219
' Thus, in his view, charity was not a kind of
playground set apart for the grown-up people of
the world to play in just as they liked. It was
part of life, and as such it could claim no title to
be released from life's ordinary responsibilities
consideration, science, and foresight. But, further,
because it was scientific, because it was not
merely emotional and whimsical, because it satis-
fied not merely the passing demands of instinctive
feeling on the transitory feverishness of devotion,
but the greater demands of religious and social
obligation, it was full of hope, and was assured
that there lay before it a promised land, where
new knowledge would lead to new experiments,
where by success and failure, " something like
permanent principles of action," would be dis-
covered and applied. This optimism of hope
through science was a constant note in everything
he said and did, so far as I knew him.
' So when the question under discussion affected
the public elementary school, his words might be
summed up thus : " Teach the teacher, teach the
child, teach the parents."
* Thus, when we discussed the assistance of
school-children, he did not take the line, so often
taken, that the teachers saw most of the children,
and therefore they would be the best almoners.
He said he " knew teachers well, and how sym-
pathetic they were towards their children. But
220 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
their sympathy required to be fortified by know-
ledge. It was impossible they should know
very much about the home circumstances of the
children. They were rarely resident in the dis-
trict of their schools ; the schools themselves
were enormous, and it was hardly possible for
them to judge by anything but obvious appear-
ances. He was inclined to think that the prin-
ciples of relief should be included in the curriculum
of training colleges."
* And the school could, in its degree, be a
centre for social education far more than at
present. He laid stress on the importance of
impressing upon children the right use of money
saved, spent, or acquired. When, in 1891, educa-
tion was made free, he took much trouble to
explain and enforce the view that the school fees
saved to the parent by the alteration of the law
might, through the child at a school bank or in
some other way, be put by to the credit of the
child or the family. As we used to say in loan
cases, when the loan is paid off, go on paying it
off to yourself and you won't want another. A
hard saying, perhaps, for borrowers but seldom
acquire the art of saving; and the parents of
elementary school- children after 1891 did as
borrowers do, when the pressure of the enforced
payment of fees was taken off their shoulders
spent the money rather than saved it. At least,
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS 221
after some time the school banks showed signs of
falling off. " Perhaps it was," he said, " partly
owing to the trouble of keeping the accounts
becoming too great for the teachers, or to the
want of interest of managers, or from the talk of
old age pensions, which, he thought, would deter
the children from saving." But however this
might be, the end of school, he felt, was not
literary or other accomplishment, but life. This,
no doubt, he said in many ways and on many
occasions. But on his recognition of it depended
his faith in the doctrine of parental responsibility.
If the end of school was life, to weaken parental
responsibility was to spoil both school and life too.
The parents were could not but be teachers
also. If they were tempted to resign their posts
as home-teachers, or became incompetent for such
an office, the teaching power of the whole nation
on the social side would be reduced immensely.
Accordingly, for instance, he looked on the em-
ployment of children out of school- hours with
more lenience than would satisfy many philan-
thropists. There were, no doubt, " shocking
instances of abuse," he said, " but they were rare
and exceptional, and diminishing under many civi-
lizing influences. It would be a grievous blunder to
disturb a natural process by introducing the hard,
harsh hand of legislation. It would be fatal to
substitute a communal for an individual conscience.
222 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
The ill-treatment of children was a serious matter,
but a far more serious and more permanent danger-
was threatened by further legislative interference
in the relations between parents and children."
School and home life were not, in fact, looked
upon by children and parents as wholly separate
one from the other school as a weary round of
severe discipline, home as a place of enforced
employment. " Lessons were made interesting,
and the children spent some of their happiest
hours in school. So, too, many of the employ-
ments in which they were occupied out of hours,
such as cleaning knives and boots, delivering
newspapers, etc., were very innocent. They were
not generally laborious. The children took pride
and pleasure in them children had a knack of
getting pleasure out of things and they were
not without a disciplinary value in teaching alert-
ness, obedience, and punctuality. They were
especially valuable in the case of a serious-minded
boy who felt his responsibilities, and wanted to
do something to help his family like a little man."
1 When one reads over these words the manner
and mind of the speaker recur to one. He had
a balanced, temperate, believing judgment. Often
the little thing that had to be done would make
all the difference, he would say in effect. So " a
little statesmanship " would settle the question of
the inspection of Poor Law schools by inspectors
OTHER DOINGS AND INTERESTS
of the Education Department, and bring them
into the general educational system of the country.
He had a long and quite exceptional experience
of life, winning his place in it by little and little,
as with the " serious-minded boy " to whom he
referred with special kindliness. Therefore he
was drawn not to large schemes, to overlegislation,
to overemphasis, in relation to society and its
wants, but to quieter means of thoughtful growth
an administration that seconded individual effort,
and individual effort as the friend and ally of the
wise administrator. He believed in that gradual
unfoldingof strength and purp ose in the people
which is, after all, the meaning of "development";
and he was patient in the presence of that self-
unfolding growth, and was reverent towards it.
In much this was a characteristic of the group of
men of a day and generation to which it was his
good fortune to belong ; in much in a very
great degree it was the outcome of his own
scientific intelligence, his administrative ability,
and his large knowledge of life. And to it all he
added a genial kindliness, which gave it a special
savour and graciousness a kindliness which none
who enjoyed his hospitality or took part in con-
versation with him will forget.'
CHAPTER VIII
THE REST OF A WORKER
SUCH services as it fell to Fitch's lot to render to
the commonalty are not exactly those which the
great public hears much of, or interests itself much
in. By the elect public, however, of those con-
cerned in education, through which he wrought for
the national future, he was widely honoured and
almost idolized. Above all, teachers of all grades
knew his worth, and listened with attention to
the least word he uttered. Official recognition of
his worth came in the way in which, perhaps, he
most valued it viz., in continuous claims of the
most various kinds upon his services. There was
more formal recognition as well. In 1885 the
University of St. Andrews conferred upon him
its honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. The
French Government made him a Chevalier of the
Legion of Honour in 1889. In 1896 the honour
of knighthood was conferred upon him by Queen
Victoria.
Even when released from the trammels of office
224
THE REST OF A WORKER 225
he never took a leading part in public affairs.
The dust and heat of the forum were distasteful
to him. His temper was essentially peaceful and
conciliatory. Strong in his convictions, and fear-
less in the expression of them, he had none of
the blunt masterfulness which distinguishes the
successful public man. He naturally approached
the most decided statement of personal conviction
along a way made smooth by a delicate and con-
scientious respect for the opinion which he was
combating. Above all, his scrupulous justice led
him to take account of factors in a given situation
which the ordinary party man could not afford to
appreciate, so that he often irritated and confused
those who thought they were most sure of his
support. He was, alike by temperament and by
his reading of the needs of the times, % con-
vinced indeed, an ardent Liberal. Yet when
Sir Michael Foster, a Unionist, stood for the
University of London against a Liberal opponent,
Fitch held that Foster's academic distinction and
scientific eminence made him the worthier candi-
date for the representation of the University, and
strongly supported him, in spite of his personal
friendship and esteem for the Liberal candidate.
Where the conflicting claims of party allegiance
and academic merit would have made decision
difficult for the ordinary voter, Fitch was clear
in his judgment of the right course to take, and
15
226 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
inflexible in his adherence to it. In the same
way he never made a secret of his detestation of
the South African War. The rude simplicity of
the people of the Boer States, their republican
spirit, their religious fervour, and their unmistak-
able sacrifices on behalf of their ideal of racial
and national freedom, won him unreservedly to
their side in the great conflict. Like others who
were influenced by the same feelings, he suffered
within from the division between what he believed
to be the cause of justice and the cause which his
country had made her own, and without from
some measure of the persecution which was meted
out in those dark days to all who took the un-
popular side. Yet he preserved both his serenity
and his common-sense throughout it all.
It was at such times that one discovered in him
the reality of that vein of quiet humour which is
the salt of life. He felt that protest to be effective
must be allied with a complete self-possession, must
work through a communicative good-humour, and
that where that failed only the protest of patient
and silent abstention from the popular madness
was possible. At the time when the horrors of the
concentration camps were sending a momentary
tremor of doubt through the hearts of even the
most unthinking supporters of the war, it was
proposed to hold an indignation meeting in
Paddington to protest against the continuance of
THE REST OF A WORKER
the system. Fitch and a friend of his, a Paddington
clergyman, who was known to be a Liberal and an
opponent of the war, were asked by their political
friends to make arrangements for the meeting ;
but Fitch strongly advised that it should not be
held, and it was accordingly abandoned. No one
was more absolutely fearless than he, but he felt
that the matter was a mere side-issue in the whole
account of the national defection from the path of
right, and that in the then state of public feeling
a meeting of protest might help to quench the
spirit of self -judgment which had begun to work,
however faintly, in the breast of the nation.
It was of this fine balance and measured temper
that the man was made.
But if he did not care to fight on the platform,
he was always fighting with his pen. In the
Nineteenth Century, the Quarterly Review, the
Contemporary, the Spectator, the Speaker, he was
always discussing the questions or the books which
interested him. The Times had no more frequent
or weighty contributor on the important events
of the passing moment. He caught and registered
the permanent note in the most discordant clamour
of public discussion. After reading the briefest
of these criticisms of his, one feels that all that is
positive and worthy in some violent public outcry
has been redeemed from the negative and vicious
elements which obscured it. In December, 1900,
152
228 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
he wrote for the Journal of Education a most wise
and timely condemnation of the movement for
introducing military drill into the public schools,
which was afterwards reprinted as a leaflet by the
National Reform Union. Every morning of his
later leisure brought him something new to think
about and to reason out calmly in his active-
meditative fashion. It was a pleasure to find him
in his literary workshop with his books, news-
papers, and reports about him, and the light
streaming in on the fine head posed in a serene
and steady activity of thought. Every sentence,
as he wrote it down, came from a lifelong expe-
rience ripened to that particular point of thought
and time. Fitch had certainly found the secret
of whatever sacredness and dignity there is in
work.
His afternoons he spent for the most part at his
club. He liked club life, as most busy men do.
Though no man was more sufficient to himself, less
dependent upon others, in the formation of his
opinions and the conduct of his business, yet he
had none of the instinct of the man of affairs for
escaping occasionally from his fellow-men. Perhaps
it was that his work brought him into contact
with so many different kinds of people, that the
human variety of his ordinary workaday life
stimulated rather than dulled his interest in
them ; perhaps it was merely native disposition.
THE REST OF A WORKER 229
At any rate, he loved to discuss the events of the
hour, the problems of politics, the tendency of
opinion. Purely personal talk interested him
less, though he was always honestly curious
about everything that happened to his friends.
The curiosity of the heart, however, is often silent
when the curiosity of a merely frivolous imagina-
tion is most voluble. In old days he was a
member of the Savile Club, and was often there.
But after his election to the Athenaeum in 1888
(he was proposed by Archbishop Temple and
seconded by Matthew Arnold), he was usually to
be found of an afternoon in its reading-room. He
liked to walk back across the park just in time for
dinner, and perhaps an evening's work of his
favourite kind a lecture to some teachers'
association or working-men's institute. Walking,
indeed, was his one form of physical exercise. He
did nor shoot, or hunt, or fish, or play golf, or,
in short, do any of the things which a healthy
Englishman is supposed to do. Yet he was
the healthiest of men, though even his holidays,
which were his great enjoyment, he liked to share
between his interest in the treasures of past
civilization or present - day social life in some
foreign city and his delight in roaming all day in
the open air on the hillsides or lower mountain-
slopes of Switzerland. Lady Fitch has contributed
the following account of their holiday times,
230 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
which were always spent together, and in later
years with their niece, Miss Pickton.
* No account of my husband's life would be com-
plete without some mention of the holidays which
he so much enjoyed. Although there was always
a little reluctance to break off from work, yet,
when a holiday was once decided on, he had keen
pleasure in arranging some interesting journey,
and he threw into his travels his characteristic
energy and enthusiasm.
' One of his earliest holidays as a young man
was to the Lake District, his love of Wordsworth
making him desirous to see the scenery which
was so familiar through the poems. He also
saw the old poet himself, and this was always
a pleasant memory. Another early journey was
a walking tour through some of the Belgian
cities, in order to acquaint himself with different
forms of church architecture, a subject which
was specially interesting to him. At different
times he also saw all the English cathedrals.
1 When our home was in York we usually came
south for our holidays, and visited relations and
friends ; but after we were settled in London our
long holidays were more often spent in foreign
travel, and generally during some part of August
and September. On the greater number of our
journeys our dear niece accompanied us.
' If there happened to be in any foreign town
THE REST OF A WORKER 231
a special fine art or industrial exhibition, my
husband would contrive to include it in our
route. He never felt, as so many do, that
exhibitions were to be avoided. Pictures could
not fail to give pleasure, but exhibitions of all
kinds were of interest to him, if only as showing
evidences of progress in various departments of
industry. An industrial exhibition at Diisseldorf
led to a trip up the Rhine and visits to some
of the old German towns, and following on an
exhibition of pictures at Amsterdam was a tour
in Holland. If there was no special exhibition
in progress, we generally arranged to visit one of
the famous galleries, so that for some years past
my husband had become almost as familiar with
them as he was with our own National Gallery.
( We all enjoyed Switzerland, not so much the
lakes or the usual crowded tourist resorts as the
high mountain places preferably those which
could only be reached on foot or by mule, as this
meant quieter hotels and fewer people. Amongst
other places, Eggischorn, Rieder Alp, Bel Alp,
Evolena, St. Luc, Chandolin, Miirren (before the
railway), Monte Generoso (before the railway),
were well known to us. At the latter place we
had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Lear, the author
of the "Book of Nonsense," with whom my hus-
band went one morning to see the sunrise from
the Bella Vista, with its wonderful view of the
SIR JOSHUA FITCH
Italian lakes, and across the Plain of Lombardy.
During our second visit to Chandolin the little
English church was opened with a special dedica-
tory service, at which my husband took a part, at
the request of the chaplain, by reading the lessons.
' Though not a regular Alpine climber, my hus-
band was a great walker, and thoroughly enjoyed
long expeditions on the glaciers or mountain
ascents. The Bel Alp was a favourite resort,
especially when the late Professor Tyndall was
staying at his chalet. He used to come down to
the hotel to see if he found friends there to invite
up to tea. We much enjoyed going, and, besides
the interesting talk there was sure to be, the
Professor knew that his guests would like the
home-made bread he gave them, which was a
contrast to the sour bread at that time provided
by the hotel. On one occasion we all, with some
friends, including the late Canon Nisbet, then
Rector of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, were making the
ascent of one of the mountains in the vicinity of
the Bel Alp. A little short of the top, where the
path became very rugged, the Canon stopped and
said he could go no further. Just then Professor
Tyndall strode up and said : " Oh, you must go
to the top ; the view is magnificent. Just follow
where I tread, and you will be quite able to
manage it," and then, with a twinkle in his eye :
" It is not the first time, you know, that Science
THE REST OF A WORKER
has come to the help of the Church." Another
favourite place was Saas Fee. One specially
pleasant visit was when Lord Avebury (then
Sir John Lubbock) was also there. My husband
was glad to have the opportunity of long talks
with his old friend ; and the walks we all took
to the glaciers and rocks were made particularly
interesting owing to Lord Avebury 's special know-
ledge.
' Although there was always keen enjoyment
for the beauties of snow mountains and glaciers,
Italy had a special attraction with its wealth of
pictures and noble churches. In all the towns
we passed through my husband used to like to
go into the church or cathedral in the early
morning and see the people crowding in before the
work of the day began, and we knew if he had
visited the market by the flowers and fruit we
would find on the breakfast-table. Venice, Verona,
and Cadenabbia, with their historic interest and
association, as well as art treasures and natural
beauty, had peculiar charm for him.
' We once took a holiday in the spring in order
to visit Rome. The weather was beautiful, so we
could enjoy to the full all that we had time to
see, and, in addition, we had the pleasure of
seeing our old friends Mrs. William Grey and
Miss ShirrefF, who had been in the habit of
wintering in Eome for many years. At their
234 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
Sunday afternoon gatherings we met Mr. Adolphus
Trollope and many other interesting English and
Italian residents. Mrs. Grey obtained for us all
tickets for a special service at the Sistine chapel,
and also kindly lent us black lace for the head,
which was necessary for all women who were
present, and which, as tourists, we had not got
with us. We were glad to have had this oppor-
tunity of seeing the magnificent sight, suggesting
a pageant of the Middle Ages. The quaint dresses
of the Swiss guard, the uniform of the officers and
Ambassadors, the picturesque costume of the Pope's
Chamberlains, the red robes of the Cardinals,
with the purple cassocks of their chaplains, were
a fine setting for the Pope himself, carried aloft
on his chair, looking as white as his robes, and
with the white peacock-feathers waving before
and behind. The beautiful music, and the digni-
fied appearance of Leo XIII. as he gave his bless-
ing, were most impressive.
' Only a short time was available for Naples.
Vesuvius was unusually active, and the streams
of lava pouring down the sides looked at night
like flames of fire. We ascended as high as we
could over the hot ashes, till stopped by the
sulphurous fumes and showers of stones. Pom-
peii surpassed our expectations. Much as we
had heard and read of its unique interest, when
we really saw the city and wandered through its
THE REST OF A WORKER 235
streets we felt that the half had not been told us,
and we regretted we could not stay longer.
' Another very memorable journey was to Ober-
ammergau to see the Passion play. It was the
last occasion on which Joseph Meyer took the
part of Christ, and the dignity and pathos of the
whole performance impressed us all very much.
My husband was such a good manager that every-
thing went smoothly with us on our travels ; only
twice did we have serious mishaps, and that
through no fault of our own.
' We were staying at the Bear Hotel at Grindel-
wald when it, together with the d^pendance,
English church, and between fifty and sixty
chalets, were burnt down. As soon as the fire
was noticed it was felt that the hotel was doomed,
as it was built mainly of wood and a strong wind
was blowing. Had it been at night, it would
have been almost impossible to escape ; as it was,
we could only save a few of our possessions by
hastily throwing them together and dragging
them into the fields. Everyone did what they
could to help the villagers save their chalets, and
we obtained shelter for the night in the village,
but the next morning started for home, as we
found we had lost so many necessary things, and
also for a time we felt indisposed to live in wooden
houses. Our only other mischance was when I
was taken seriously ill at Cadenabbia, on Lake
236 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
Como. Fortunately, Dr. Michael Foster was
spending his holiday there, and I had the advan-
tage of his great skill, as well as the most careful
nursing of my niece ; but it was many weeks
before we could return home by slow stages.
' When his anxiety with regard to me was
somewhat lessened, my husband was able to enjoy
long talks with his friend the late Bishop of
Chichester, who was staying at the next hotel.
Although of an advanced age, Bishop Durnford
was full of plans for future work, and could take
long walks, and seemed to be in his usual health
when he left Cadenabbia. It was sad, therefore,
to hear of his death as he was on his way home.
' One year we went to the Channel Islands, and
at Jersey had the pleasure of seeing the Bailiff
and his wife, Sir George and Lady Bertram, who
remain warm friends now that he has retired and
lives in London. We also met a French friend,
who suggested our visiting her at her chateau in
Caen. This we did, and a most interesting,
quaint place we found it, with its numerous heir-
looms. We then continued our tour in Normandy,
staying a few days at Mont St. Michel.
' Our American journey is referred to elsewhere.
Holidays were also spent in Wales, Scotland, and
Ireland. On our last visit to Dublin my husband
had the pleasure of lunching with Archbishop
Walsh, who wished to talk over Irish education
THE REST OF A WORKER 237
difficulties with him. The two had often corre-
sponded, but had not before met.
' When staying at Gleiigariff the fine spectacle
was to be witnessed of some of the Channel Fleet
in Bantry Bay. Admiral Sir Harry Rawson was
staying in the same hotel as we were, and most
kindly lent us his steam yacht to take us out to
the Jupiter^ with a letter of introduction to the
commander, Captain Durnford (now one of the
Lords of the Admiralty), who received us most
courteously, and enabled us to see what a man-
of-war was like.
'Our last foreign journey was to Italy, spending
some days in Milan to revisit the Brera Gallery,
and then going to Perugia and Assisi. My hus-
band had always been specially fond of Perugino
as a painter, and a portrait of him had hung for
many years in our drawing-room. It was a great
pleasure to see his work in Perugia, and the olive-
trees and blue Umbrian hills, which form the
background to so many of his pictures. The visit
to Assisi one can never forget, nor Ravenna, with
its wonderful mosaics.
1 We had planned to see these places another
year, adding Siena and some of the hill towns,
but this was not to be.
' My husband's energy in all he took part was
noticeable in his play as well as work. He liked
to get to know a town as much as was possible in
238 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
a short stay, and enjoyed wandering through the
streets and observing the people. Not content
with ordinary sightseeing, he would go into a
school and see the children, chat to the peasants
in the market-place and to the priests in the
churches, and after dinner stroll out to see the
simple amusements of the people. Everywhere
he had an eye for old book- shops, and in Paris all
available time was spent on the quays looking at
the bookstalls there.
' At mere halting-places his power of seeing
below the surface enabled him to find something
of interest, so that every journey continued
throughout delightful to us all.
' Travelling as we did at the official holiday time,
we were sure to come across many friends, but it
was a surprise when the cultivated monk with
whom he talked when we stayed at the St. Bernard
Hospice recognised his name, and showed him
one of his lectures in the library of the monastery.
In addition to our foreign journeys, we frequently
attended the meetings of the British Association,
my husband reading papers or taking part in the
discussions in the economic section. The meetings
were always interesting, and it was at the one at
Norwich that the Bishop of Peterborough (Dr.
Magee) preached a very remarkable sermon. We
also attended many meetings of the Social Science
Congress, and occasionally the Church Congress.
THE REST OF A WORKER 239
When the latter met in York, we entertained as
many clergy as our house would accommodate.'
In religion, Fitch would probably have described
himself as a Broad Churchman, a Liberal of the
non- theological school, a mixture of what was
best in the pietist and the humanist. He hoped
for and laboured towards a practical unity among
the different religious communions into which the
theological spirit had divided English Christianity.
It was this hope which attracted him to become
a member of the Christian Conference, an occa-
sional convention of Churchmen and Noncon-
formists which still meets under the presidency
of the Dean of Ripon. Fitch was a most regular
attendant at its meetings. He was also one of
the original members of the Churchmen's Union,
a society of Churchmen which aimed at dis-
engaging the positive religious results of a critical
and historical treatment of the Christian docu-
ments and doctrines. But it was religion itself
that he cared for, the profound and eternal lessons
of the long experience of the human heart in its
attempt to be true to the highest. His was the
common religion of the English layman, a religion
that may occasionally attribute a kind of secondary
importance to theological technicalities, but is more
often indifferent to and even a little suspicious of
them. Among his best friends were some of the
more Liberal English clergy of the passing genera-
240 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
tion men like the Bishop of Hereford, Mr.
Llewelyn Davies, Mr. Haweis, Professor Bonney,
Mr. Shepard, late surmaster of St. Paul's School,
Prebendary Covington, Mr. Barion Mills, Mr.
de Courcy Laffan, and Mr. Bradley Alford, the
late Vicar of St. Luke's, Nutford Place. It was
at St. Luke's that Fitch worshipped during all
the later years of his life. And Mr. Alford it
is who has written in a few sentences one of the
most charming and faithful pictures of the man.
' What I admired so much in Sir Joshua Fitch
was his great versatility of mind. That education
of others which constituted his life-work, and
which has often had a narrowing influence on
those who undertake it officially, was for him the
opening to many and various interests. He would
discuss the different characteristics of paintings
in the National Gallery ; he would bring his
experience of the world to bear upon the vexed
questions of pauperism and relief ; he would come
out of an evening, tired, no doubt, after a day
full of engagements, to meet the working men of
London socially face to face. I used to wonder
at his unflagging energy at a time when retire-
ment from office might well tend to repose. Nor
did he do these things with the air of a man
performing a duty, but with all the appearance
of one enjoying to the full whatever he did.
* He was an admirable chairman of a meeting,
THE REST OF A WORKER
as full of courtesy as of tact, knowing when to
intervene and how to sum up results.
6 In respect of the chief subject of my own
studies, theology, while he had no patience with
the blatant ecclesiasticism of the day, the inter-
pretation of Scripture, its application to the prac-
tical needs of existence, the Catholicism, which
is truly catholic, in that it loves and sympathizes
with the truth honestly upheld in any and every
church, and rates a man according to his conscience
and character rather than by his outward creed,
these things found in him an ardent supporter.
' Once I met with a refusal from him which
rankled in my mind for a moment, but which I
can now look back upon as having been both just
and wise. It was at the time when the Education
Department was pressing somewhat heavily (as
we thought) upon voluntary schools, insisting on
considerable outlay for improved accommodation.
I appealed to Sir Joshua Fitch, as knowing me
and my colleagues, to obtain some exemption for
us, or mitigation of requirements ; but he would
not turn his friendship into favouritism on our
behalf, and we have lived to find out that we are
much the better off for not having been spared.
* May the education of the future meet with
others like-minded, to guide authority rightly
through the difficulties of a new departure !'
Fitch's interest in religious teaching was of the
16
242 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
keenest. It was an interest of long standing.
When he was still at Borough Road he found time
to take a Sunday-school class. In 1862 he de-
livered an address on ' The Art of Teaching in a
Sunday-school' before the General Sunday Con-
vention. He lectured, too, on the same theme to
the members of the Church Sunday -Schools Asso-
ciation, founded by the late Canon Cadman, and
to the Sunday-School Union. It was a subject
on which he had thought much and thought
clearly, and he looked forward to a transforma-
tion and a consequent development of the Sunday-
school system as a result of the growing and
inevitable tendency to reduce the time devoted to
religious teaching in the ordinary day-schools.
His admirable essay on this subject has been
reprinted in his volume entitled ' Educational
Aims and Methods.'
Though so much a man of the town and of its
busy life, he loved the peace and charm of the
country. It was a kind of Words worthian pleasure
he found in Nature, the pleasure of the meditative
mind and the restful spirit. Indeed, through
many a dusty summer heat in London, his
Wordsworth was for him, in the intervals of
repose from labour, the kindly deputy of Nature
and custodian of her secret treasure. But it was
a refreshment to consult her at first hand as often
as he could gain a few days' freedom, and to
THE REST OF A WORKER 243
learn from herself her secret things. He enjoyed
in old days the week-ends which he was often
invited to spend at High Elms, Lord Avebury's
place in Kent. There he sometimes met Darwin,
who lived near, and Ruskin. He liked the high-
souled prophet of Nature, even in his most over-
powering and oracular moods. In 1902 an ex-
hibition was held in London with the view of
fostering the study of Nature in schools. Fitch
worked hard to organize it, and read a delightful
paper at one of the conferences arranged in con-
nection with it on ' The Influence of Nature -
Study on School and on the Home-Life.'
Thus he spent the evening of his days, import-
ing the vivid interest of youth into everything
he did, and ready, at the invitation of his friends,
to turn his knowledge and experience to such
useful account as they might require. Now Dr.
Welldon would have him consult on methods of
teaching in public schools with his masters at
Harrow ; now his friend the Bishop of Hereford
would have him address his diocesan conference
on the best way of using the educational endow-
ments of the diocese. It was, indeed, on the
occasion of this last engagement that the first
signs of the end, as yet unsuspected by any,
came. He had a slight attack of illness, enough
to prevent his travelling down to Hereford, and
the paper which he had carefully prepared had to
162
244 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
be read in his absence. It was the first touch
of the disease that, within a year, was to
bring the end. But for the moment he speedily
recovered, and all the old equable energy was
renewed. Often in those last years, and even
months, his heart went back to the special
work of his lifetime, to ,the ideals of his old
calling, to all that an inspector might be and do
for the cause of education in his district. At
Bath, at Guildford, at West Ham, he addressed
meetings of people interested in education whom
the inspectors had drawn around them. He had
become a kind of educational patriarch, whose
jurisdiction extended over the whole country, and
who had even won a kind of informal, but very
efficient, authority far beyond our shores. Quite
suddenly the end came to all this unresting, but
always serene and happy, work. Towards the
end of June, 1903, he had a sharp attack of his
former illness. It turned to jaundice, and he
gradually became unconscious, and passed away
peacefully on July 14. He was laid to rest in
Kensal Green Cemetery on Saturday, July 18.
Nearly every educational interest in London was
represented at the service in St. Mary's, Padding-
ton Green, where during his later years he had
frequently worshipped. The service was taken by
his old friend the Bishop of Hereford and the
Vicar of St. Mary's. Never did the familiar
THE REST OF A WORKER 245
hymn, ' Now the labourer's task is o'er,' recall the
memories of a nobler life or record the Christian
hope for it with a juster confidence. The master-
worker in a great cause was with us no more, but
his work, and, we may hope, the spirit of his work,
had become a part of the England that is to be.
His life had been singularly happy. There
was in it none of that divorce, from which so
many suffer, between the body and the soul,
between the individual impulse and the public
work, between life in the home and life in the
world. Unfailing health, a native radiance of
spirit, the sense of original vocation for his work,
and, above all, the ceaseless interest of the com-
panion of his life in all he did these made his
life a perfect harmony. His wife had been a
help meet for him. His friends were her friends,
his interests were her interests. She knew, with
something of his own intimate knowledge, the
details of every new educational project on which
his mind and heart were set. She worked with
him in the cause of women's education, and was,
both consciously and unconsciously, his inspira-
tion in it. Their tastes and sympathies were so
mutually responsive that the friend of the one
became almost of course the friend of the other.
They had no children of their own, but they both
loved children, and they bestowed all the affection
which their children would have received upon
246 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
their niece and adopted daughter, who repaid it
with an entire devotion. The three did not
merely live together in one house : they made one
home, and carried it with them into the life of
the world. In all their voluntary work, in social
life, in their working days and their holidays
alike, they were always together. Only death
brought parting, and a withdrawal of the visible
presence of one of them from that indissoluble
bond of affection. Two good and brave women
still do their work in the world in the certainty
that such shows of things as time and change
cannot break it.
Shortly after her husband's death the Prime
Minister offered Lady Fitch a pension on the
Civil List. She felt, more than anything else,
the recognition of her husband's literary eminence
by one who was himself a distinguished thinker
and writer. Fitch had lived a life of such high
conscientiousness and devotion to the work in
hand that he could never have hoped to die rich.
It is well that the country should feel its respon-
sibility towards such men. The Civil List pen-
sions cease to be an anachronism when they are
so worthily distributed, when they recognise the
merit of a career of self-spending in the country's
service. In this case the gift was as great an
honour to him who offered it as to her who re-
ceived it.
THE REST OF A WORKER 247
Sir Joshua Fitch enjoyed a great reputation,
and wielded a great and legitimate authority
over the whole field of his interests. Outside
it he was content to remain unknown, and
probably was unknown. Yet he was worth the
great world's knowing, for the very reasons
which left him to it unknown. The typical
Englishman is the official administrator, the man
who can put all that is best in him his intellect,
his imagination, his enthusiasm into the routine
work of a lifetime. The work of such men is
probably more alive than any other work done
on earth. It is not a machine product ; it is
warmly human. It is such work that makes
England what it is. Yet the men who do it
remain comparatively unknown. Fitch was this
typical Englishman at his very best. There were
no exceptional moments in his life. There were
in the stuff of his character none of those eccentric
qualities which compel attention. His personality
was fused in his work, and was fused equably
in its every moment. Men were struck by the
hopefulness, the geniality, the thoroughness, the
easy, unhasting accomplishment, the steady ex-
cellence, amid much variety, of his work. But it
was not wonderful, for these were his own personal
qualities translated into the only form of expression
which they ever needed or desired. Fitch was
the typical Englishman in that being and doing
248 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
were for him one thing. He would have dis-
trusted the work which had not demanded and
secured the heart's alliance with the head and
hand. The record of his own work is at once a
national possession and a national inspiration.
How it all struck a contemporary will appear
from the following reminiscences of one who had
known him in many phases of his public service,
the present Master of Peterhouse* :
' I think that it was shortly before I settled down
as a Professor at the Owens College, Manchester
why I mention this circumstance will immediately
appear that Mr. W. E. Forster, who was then
incubating the great Education Act of 1870, of
which Sir Joshua Fitch remained to the last a
resolute upholder, selected him as one of two
special commissioners appointed to report on the
educational conditions of some of the great-
northern towns ; but, if I remember right, it was
not he, but Mr. Bryce, who visited Manchester.
Some years later, however, when the Owens
College was rising in revolt against the fetters im-
posed upon its legitimate advance by its necessary
dependence upon the examination system of the
University of London, Mr. Fitch and the writer
of this letter came into public contact, and, indeed,
into what I suppose I ought to describe as con-
flict. At a meeting of the Social Science Con-
* Dr. A. W. Ward,
THE REST OF A WORKER 249
gress at Cheltenham in 1878 he held a brief
against me for the University of London, for
which he always cherished a loyalty with which
that rather stony-hearted mother must be allowed
to have succeeded in inspiring some of the most
generous of her children. I am speaking, of
course, of the University of the past, which
Mr. Fitch had formerly served as an Examiner
in the comprehensive " English " group of subjects
for several years not of the present teaching
University, which his endeavours as a member
of the Senate were to help to call into life.
' He, or the policy of caution which he repre-
sented, was victorious in that first encounter ;
but very soon a compromise was approved, and
the revolving years have in due course brought
with them a complete concession of the academical
independence which Manchester had the audacity
to claim more than a quarter of a century ago.
My contention with my Cheltenham adversary was
not an embittered one ; for his sense of justice
never deserted him in argument, and I felt then,
as I had ample reason for knowing afterwards,
that it was not in his nature to refuse sympathy,
or even co-operation, in any educational develop-
ment which offered greater opportunities of pro-
gress without sacrificing the necessary safeguards
of efficiency.
' The all but unequalled experience which he
250 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
acquired during the years in which the inspection
of training colleges for women was in his hands
he readily placed at our service when we ventured
on the experiment of connecting day training
colleges for men and women with our Northern
University College ; and when, at a later date,
we took the more novel step of instituting a
University diploma for secondary teachers, his
aid, both as an adviser and as our first examiner
in the theory and practice of teaching, were
invaluable. On the whole subject of the train-
ing of teachers, Sir Joshua Fitch, by means of
his published " Lectures " and mixed educational
papers, which show the results of his American
as well as home experience, will long remain a
standard authority ; and if he has not lived to
see a fuller recognition of the value of training
for secondary teachers in particular, the lines are
now laid down along which the advance must
prove irresistible. Sir Joshua Fitch was well
aware of the nature of the lordly indifference
against which the methods advocated by him
have to contend, but will, it is still conceivable,
not in the end have to contend in vain.
c In the years all too few which followed
upon his retirement from regular official work,
but which certainly could not be called a period
of leisure, I had the pleasure of meeting Sir
Joshua more frequently than of old. He took
THE REST OF A WORKER 251
much interest in the responsibilities of his
governorship at Girton, and we also met once
or twice at St. Paul's, where it is a satisfaction
to think that he lived to see the definitive estab-
lishment of the girls' school, and to take part in
the election of its first head mistress. The higher
education of women had no warmer and more
constant friend than Sir Joshua Fitch, who on
this head was true not only to the most fertile
traditions of the University of London, but also
to the true Liberalism which was part of his
nature. I am not referring to his political sym-
pathies, of which he made no secret, but which
he was not the man to allow to influence his
public work or to affect its spirit a fact well
understood by the Minister who recommended
him for the honour that fitly crowned his official
career.
1 No better, and at the same time no more
pleasing, illustration of Sir Joshua's Fitch's ever-
fresh interest in secondary education, and of his
appreciation of the fact that the line separating it
from primary is a purely formal one, could be
furnished than his book on Thomas and Matthew
Arnold, one of the last products of his inde-
fatigable pen. The last word may have been
said certainly, no more satisfactory, and at the
same time no more temperate, judgment has, to
my knowledge, yet been pronounced on some of
252 SIR JOSHUA FITCH
the matters incidentally treated here (the place of
classical studies in our secondary, the method of
biblical teaching in our primary, schools, and the
like) ; but the questions still burn, and it is use-
less to stir them at the corners. I therefore
prefer to conclude by pointing out that this
unpretending volume shows Sir Joshua Fitch to
have possessed literary gifts of no common order.
' The account of Thomas Arnold is, to my mind,
the best brief summary which we possess of his
character and genius, and there never was an
eminent man in whom it was less possible to
distinguish the one from the other. Sir Joshua
Fitch perceives that the dominating qualities in
Thomas Arnold were not those of the scholar or
even of the educationist a word which Sir
Joshua says Matthew Arnold abominated, but
which I can vouch for his having found himself
constrained to employ. Thomas Arnold was a
statesman at heart and in purpose ; but as he
was never made even a Bishop, the legend has
grown up which, though it seeks to do justice to
many qualities unmistakably possessed by him,
has contrived to dwarf what was his real intel-
lectual stature. Of Matthew Arnold's personality
Sir Joshua writes with the kindliest appreciation,
touching his foibles with the gentlest forbearance,
and justly extolling the vivifying power which
his faith in his ideals exercised even over the
THE REST OF A WORKER 253
rank and file of the profession with which
fate half-whimsically connected him. That the
biographer was capable of sounding the depths
of his brilliant colleague's mind is proved inter
alia by a sentence to which, in form as well as
in matter, I hardly think Matthew Arnold him-
self would have disdained to subscribe :
' " There is in Arnold little of the rather help-
less lament over an unforgotten but irrecoverable
belief, such as is to be found in * In Memoriam,'
where weak faith is seen trying to come to the
aid of weaker doubt ; but a sane and manly
recognition of the truth that, while some changes
in the form of men's religious life are inevitable,
the spirit and the power of the Christian faith
are sure to survive."
' For the rest, as this volume does not fail
to show, great writers with lofty aims, and great
statesmen in esse and in posse, must alike suffer
from limitations imposed upon them by a resist-
less fate. And, albeit such a thought is unlikely
to have suggested itself to one so arduous in
endeavour and at the same time so modest in
self-judgment as the subject of this letter, he is
not to be accounted unenviable in life or in death,
to whom it was given to perceive the full signi-
ficance of the life's task which he was set to
perform, and to achieve it within his allotted
day/
254 SIR JOSHUA^FITCH
One of the best appreciations of him has been
written by one who did not see much of him, but
evidently saw him sympathetically and under-
stood him well Mr. Percy Bunting. He says :
' I first came to know Sir Joshua Fitch over
thirty years ago. The Wesleyan Methodist
Church had appointed a small commission to
consider the reform of their schools for ministers'
sons, and made me secretary of it. Looking
about for skilled advice on the subject, I applied
to Mr. Fitch, whom, of course, I knew by reputa-
tion as one of the most trusted of our educational
experts. He attended our little meeting, and
delighted us all, both by his personal interest in
our business and by the wisdom of his counsel.
He was one of those charming personalities whom
to meet was to know and to be friends with.
Acquaintance at once took on the colour of friend-
ship. His urbanity, his courtesy, his gracious
manner were no masks ; they simply displayed at
once and frankly the genial warmth of a sincere
and pure soul. Ever after that first interview
I seemed to know him familiarly, and we often
met in public and private. I think of him now
as one of the serenest of men, busy intensely
busy but always at rest, always master of him-
self and his work, never hurried or perplexed,
clear and methodical, and, withal, entirely devoted.
He was inevitably a Liberal by temper, hopeful,
THE REST OF A WORKER 255
firm in his grasp of principles, knowing what he
believed and what he wanted done, and entirely
given up to it ; so certain that he could freely
welcome new ideas and new criticisms ; at ease
in his deep faith in knowledge and goodness. Of
his great ability and the task he accomplished I
am not competent to speak. His memory does
not seem to me mournful, for his life and work
were complete and rounded, and his graciousness
abides in the hearts of those who remain behind/
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Lectures to Sunday-School Teachers.
Science of Arithmetic.
School Arithmetic.
Arithmetic for Beginners.
Lectures on Teaching Cambridge Press
Educational Aims and Methods ,,
Notes on American Schools and Colleges Macmillan
Thomas and Matthew Arnold Heinemann
,, ,, (American Edition) ... Scribner
MAGAZINE ARTICLES, ETC.
London University London Quarterly Review, 1857
Decimal Coinage
Arithmetic Ancient and Modern ,, ,, ,,
Language and Grammar ... ,, ,,
English Dictionaries ,, ,, ,, ,,
Children's Literature ,, ,, ,, ,,
Social Science ,, ,, 1858
Arctic Explorations ,, ,, 1859
Why is a New Code Wanted? 1861
International Exhibition Planet, 1862
Joseph Lancaster Museum, 1863
On Teaching English History ,, ,,
On the Teaching of Arithmetic ,, ,,
The Education of Women Victoria Magazine, 1864
Proposed Admission of Girls to the University Local Ex-
aminations Museum, 1865
Educational Endowments Fraser's Magazine, 1869
Charity
Dulwich College 1873
Charity Schools Westminster Review, 1873
Statistical Fallacies respecting Public Instruction
Fortnightly Review, 1873
256
BIBLIOGRAPHY 257
Unsolved Problems in National Education
Fortnightly Review, 1874
Economic Experiment in the Communal Schools of Ghent
Macmillan's Magazine, 1875
Universities and Training of Teachers
Contemporary Review, 1876
University Work in Great Towns ... Nineteenth Century, 1878
London University Quarterly Review, 1887
Chautauqua Heading Circle Nineteenth Century, 1888
Education Chambers' Cyclopaedia 1889
Women and the Universities ... Contemporary Review, 1890
Contemporary Thought in England
Educational Review, New York, 1891
Memorandum on Free School System in America, France,
and Belgium, prepared at the request of the Govern-
ment 1891
A Teaching University for London ... Quarterly Review, 1892
Professional Training of Teachers
Educational Review, New York, 1892
Instructions to H.M. Inspectors, with appendices on Thrift
and Training of Pupil Teachers, issued by Education
Department 1893
Proposed University for London
Educational Review, New York, 1893
Religion in Primary Schools Nineteenth Century, 1894
The Bible in Elementary Schools ... ,,
Eeligious Issue in the London Schools
Educational Review, New York, 1895
Education and the State ... Contemporary Review, 1895
Some Flaws in the Education Bill ... Nineteenth Century, 1896
London University Problem 1897
Creeds in the Primary Schools
Eeligious Education in England ... Educational Record, 1899
Primary Education in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter in ' Education in Nineteenth Century,' 1901
Preface to Teachers' Edition of * Life of Stanley ' 1901
Inspection of Secondary Schools
From ' National Education, a symposium,' 1901
Higher Grade Board Schools Nineteenth Century, 1901
Education Problem 1902
Amendments to Education Bill ... ,,
17
258 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Supplementary Article on Education in ' Encyclopaedia
Britannica.'
Several biographies in * National Dictionary of Biography.'
University of London : Sketch of Work and History usyd as
Preface to the Calendar.
Preface to ' Elementary Education ' Manual.
LECTUKES AND ADDRESSES.
Professional Training of Teachers 1859
Middle Class Education 1865
York Institute ... 1866
Methods of Teaching Arithmetic 1869
College for Working Women 1872
Yorkshire Union of Mechanics Institutes ... ... ... 1875
Proposal for New University in North of England (Social
Science Congress) 1878
Edgehill Training College ... 1885
Endowments University of Pennsylvania ... ... ... 1888
Stockwell Training College 1898
Presidential Address, Teachers' Guild 1895
Some Limitations to Technical Instruction 1897
Norwood Technical Institute 1898
Conference of Managers and Teachers of the Guildf ord District 1901
Jubilee of Eussell British School 1902
Hereford Diocesan Conference 1902
British Teachers' Association 1902
Influence of Nature Study on School and Home Life . . . 1902
School Work in Relation to Business 1902
Reports on Yorkshire District, 1864, 1867, 1869.
Schools Inquiry Commission on Grammar Schools and Secondary
Instruction hi Yorkshire.
Reports on Lambeth District, 1878, 1882.
Reports on Lambeth and Eastern Counties, 1884.
Reports on Women's Training Colleges, 1886, 1887, 1888, 1889,
1890, 1891, 1892, 1893.
Report on Technical Education in Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1897.
Memorandum on Training of Teachers for Royal Commission on
Secondary Education.
The Relations which should subsist between Primary and Secondary
Schools (Royal Commission on Secondary Education).
INDEX
AINGBR, CANON, 92
Alderley, Lady Stanley of, 143
Alford, Eev. Bradley, 240, 241
* American Schools and Colleges,
Notes on,' 69, 164
America, visit to, 69, 164, 165,
166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171,
172
Anderson, Mrs. Garrett, 151
Andrews, Miss, 140
Arnold, Matthew, agreement
with, as to State action, 29,
176, 229, 252, 258
' Arnold, Thomas and Matthew,'
32, 252
Athenaeum Club, 229
Avebury, Lord, 233, 243
Barkby, W., 11
Beale, Miss, 136, 140
Bedford College, 143, 154
Bertram, Sir George and Lady,
236
Bonet-Maury, M., 210, 211
Bonney, Professor, 240
Borough Road Training College,
8,9
' Brain and Nervous Pressure in
School,' 138
Bristol, Bishop of 205-207
British and Foreign School
Society, 8, 9
Brooks, Phillips, 169, 170
Browne, Miss Leigh, 150
Bryce, Right Hon. James, 96-
99
Bunting, Mr. Percy, 254
Buss, Miss F. M., 136
Butler, Mrs. J. E., 123
' Charity,' Fraser's Magazine,
212
Charity Organization Society,
212, 213-223
Chautauqua, meeting at, 171
Chautauqua Reading Circles, 172
Cheltenham Ladies' College,
135
Christian conference, 239
Churchmen's Union, 239
Church schools, inspectors for,
32; disadvantages of system,
34, 35
Clough, Miss, 123, 144
College de France, 193
College Hall, 149, 155
College for Working Women, 155
Contemporary Review, 227
Cornwell, Dr., 9
Covington, Prebendary, 240
Cox-Edwardes, Rev. J. C., 199
Crossley, Mr. John, 15
Davies, Miss Emily, 142, 143,
144, 146
Davies, Rev. J. Llewelyn, 117,
240
Diary, objections to keeping a, 20
Doctor of Laws, St. Andrews.
224
Domestic economy, teaching of,
46
259
260
INDEX
Duncombe, Dr. (Dean of York),
93
Durnford, Bishop, 236
Durnford, Captain, 237
Education Bills of 1896, 1902,
criticism on, 183, 184, 185,
186, 187, 188, 189, 190
Education, compulsory, 191, 192
Education, Journal of, 228
Education prior to Act of 1870,
23, 24, 25, 26
Education, religious, 185, 186,
187
'Educational Aims and
Methods,' 242
Educational Review (New
York), 167
Eliot, Dr., 167
Endowed Schools Commission,
67, 72, 87
Endowments, educational, 73,
75
Examinations : Indian Civil
Service and London Univer-
sity, 91
Examinations, method of con-
ducting, 116
Fearon, D. E., 94
Ferry, M. Jules, 210
Fitch, Lady, 13, 14, 169, 229,
245, 246
Fitch, Eev. Thomas, 2
Fitch, Mr. William, 2
Fitch, Joshua Girling : birth, 1 ;
family, 1 ; brothers, 2 ; Borough
Koad School, 3; study for
matriculation, 5 ; Sunday-
school teacher, 5 ; assistant-
master at Southwark, 5 ;
interest in Tractarian Move-
ment, 6 ; devotional literature,
7; headmastership at Kings-
land, 7; B.A. and M.A. de-
grees, 8 ; tutor at Borough
Road Training College, 8 ;
Vice - Principal and Principal
of College, 9; lectures on
method, 11 ; teaching children,
12 ; marriage, 13 ; adoption of
niece, 13 ; friends, 15 ; interest
in life, 16 ; almoner to Society
for Relief of Distress, 19 ;
objections to keeping a diary,
21 ; appointment as H.M. In-
spector of Schools, 22; re-
moval to York, 23 ; descrip-
tion of district, 27 ; educational
ideal, 28 ; work of inspector,
30, 31 ; reports on Yorkshire
district, 36 ; advice to teachers,
41 ; religious teaching in
schools, 43, 185 ; discrimina-
tion with regard to educational
suggestions, 47 ; criticism of
teachers, 51 ; responsibility of
parents, 56 ; payment of fees,
58 ; need for State action, 60 ;
Schools Inquiry Commission,
66 ; report on education in
four large towns, 66 ; Assis-
tant-Commissioner under En-
dowed Schools Act, 67 ; In-
spector of Schools in East
Lambeth, 67 ; Chief Inspector
for Eastern Division, 67 ; In-
spector of Training Colleges
for Women, 67 ; extension of
time of service, 68; retirement,
68 ; visit to America, 69 ; re-
port on free school system,
69 ; reports on Endowed
Schools Commission, 74-86 ;
testimonial on leaving York,
86 ; friends in York, 92, 94 ;
examiner at University of
London, 102 ; Fellow of Uni-
versity and member of Senate,
102; Governor of University
College, 102 ; views as to work
of a University, 103-113 ; ex-
aminer for Indian Civil Ser-
vice, 114-118 ; University ex-
tension, 120 ; North of England
Council for Higher Education
INDEX
261
of Women, 123 ; women's
work in the world, 130 ; edu-
cation of women, 135-142;
Girton College, 143 ; decrees
for women at London Univer-
sity, 145 ; women's University,
146, 147, 148; address to
Post - Office employes, 152 ;
Pfeiffer bequest, 153, 154, 155;
Holloway College, 155 ; High-
school girls and outside
teachers for elementary
schools, 156, 157 ; Maria Grey
Training College, 158 ; Roman
Catholic Training College, 159 ;
visit to America, 164-172 ;
technical instruction, 177-179 ;
importance of head as well as
hand work, 180 ; savings-banks
in schools, 181 ; views on
Education Bills of 1894 and
1902, 183-190; free school
system in America, France,
and Belgium, 190, 191 ; pre-
sentation of portrait, 195 ;
Departmental Committee on
Poor Law schools, 198 ; Com-
mittee on Working of Marine
and Dockyard Schools, 199;
Committee on Greenwich
Hospital School, 200; lectures,
202 ; St. Paul's Girls' School,
203-207; help to foreign
students, 208 - 211 ; Charity
Organization Society, 212-223 ;
Doctor of Laws, 224 ; Chevalier
of Legion of Honour, 224 ;
knighthood, 224 ; University
of London Parliamentary
election, 225 ; South African
War, 226, 227 ; club life, 229 ;
holidays, 230 - 238 ; religious
views, 239 ; teaching in Sun-
day-schools, 242; nature-study
exhibition, 243 ; illness and
death, 244
Forster, Eight Hon. W. E., 95
Foster, Sir Michael, 225
Foster, Dr. Michael, 236
Free school system, working of
in America, France, and Bel-
gium, 164
Fry, Miss Isabel, 157
Girls, Church of England High
School for, 141
Girls' Public Day School Com-
pany, 135
Girton College, 143, 145, 154
Granville, Lord, 23
Green, Thomas Hill, 94
Grey, Mrs. William, 135, 233,
234
Grove, Miss, 149
Hale, Dr. Edward Everett, 165
' Half-timers,' reply to, 48
Haweis, Eev. H. B., 240
Hereford, Bishop of, 243, 244
Hill, Dr. (Master of Downing),
172
Hobhouse, Lord, 88, 118
Holidays, 230-239
Holloway College, 155
Holmes, Dr. Wendell, 169
Hunter, Sir Eobert, 195
Indian Civil Service Commis-
sioners, 116
Indian students, 209, 210
Italian journeys, 233, 234, 235
Jones, Miss H. M., 136
Kenrick, Eev. J., 94
Lady Margaret Hall, 143
Laffan, Eev. E. de Courcy, 240
Lambeth, East, report on, 41
Lancaster, Mr. Joseph, 8
Latham, Miss, 201
Laurent, Monsieur, Professor at
Ghent, 182
Lear, Edward, 231
Lectures on ' Science, Art, and
History of Education,' 137
262
INDEX
Lectures on teaching at Univer-
sity of Cambridge, 137
Legion of Honour, Chevalier of,
224
Literature, English teaching of,
in schools, 50, 51
' Literature, Value of, in a Busi-
ness Life,' 203
Local interest, importance of
utilizing, 29, 59
Loch, Mr. C. S., 213-223
Macaulay, Zachary, 13
McCarthy, Kev. E. F. M., 94
Macmillan's Magazine, article
on ' School Savings-Banks, 3 182
Magee, Dr., 238
MaWa Vale High School, 140
Manning, Miss E. A., 208, 209,
210
Maria Grey Training College,
154, 158
Mason, Sir Josiah, 95, 96
Merivale, Miss J., 156
Military drill in schools, 228
Mills, Kev. Barton, 240
Monk, Dr., 94
Mundella, Right Hon. A. J.,
153, 198
Murray Butler, Dr., 167
National Gallery, lecture on, 201
National Home Beading Union,
172
National Portrait Gallery, lec-
ture on, 201, 203
National Reform Union, 228
Nature-study exhibition, 243
' Nature Study, Influence of, on
School and Home Life,' 243
Newnham College, 143, 154
Nineteenth Century, 110, 227
Nisbet, Canon, 232
Netting Hill High School, 136,
139
Parents, payment of fees by, 58,
59
Parents, responsibility of, 56, 57
Paris, technical schools in, 178,
179, 180
Parkman, Mr. Francis, 169
Paton, Dr., 172
Pennsylvania, University of, ad-
dress before, 75
Pfeiffer, Emily, 153
Pfeiffer, Mr., will of, 153
Pickton, Miss, 14, 169, 212, 230
Post-Office, employes at, 152
Quain, Sir Richard, 145
Quarterly Review, 110, 227
Queen's College, London, 143,
154
Reading-books, need of care in
selection of, 37
Reading, importance of, in
schools, 41
Religious teaching, importance
of, 42
Ripon, Dean of, 239
Roman Catholic Training Col-
lege, 159
Ruskin, John, 243
Sabatier, Auguste, 210
Satthianadhar, S., 209
Savile Club, 229
Savings-banks in schools, 181
Scholarships, travelling, 210
School of Medicine for Women,
151, 154
School, Greenwich Hospital, 200
Schools, Endowed, Commission,
67
Schools Inquiry Commission,
66,70
Schools, Poor Law, 198
Schools, Royal Marine and
Dockyard, 199
Schools, voluntary, value of, 189
Shaw Lefevre, Right Hon. J.,
198
Shepard, Rev. J. W., 240
Shirreff, Miss, 135, 233
INDEX
263
Singleton, Eev. K. Corbet, 93
Smith, Dr. Vance, 94
Society for Employment of
Women, 152, 155
Society for Relief of Distress, 19
Somerville College, 143, 154
Sorbonne, 193
South African War, 226, 227
Southwark, Bishop of, 156
Speaker, 227
Spectator, 227
Spencer, Lord, 199
Stanley, Lady, of Alderley, 143
State action, object of, 60, 61, 62,
63
Storr, Mr. Francis, 68, 70
St. Hugh's Hall, 143
St. Mary's College, Paddington,
201
St. Paul's School, 205
St. Paul's Girls' School, 204,
206, 207
Strong, Miss, 141
Stuart, Professor James, 124
' Sunday School of the Future,' 5
Sunday-school Teachers, Asso-
ciation of, 5, 242
Swallow, Eev. E. D., 89
Swanwick, Miss Anna, 153, 154,
194, 195
Switzerland, travels in, 231, 232
Teachers, advice to, 39, 41, 43,
51, 52, 53, 54
Teachers, conventions of, in
America, 171
Teachers' Guild, address to
members, 40
Technical instruction, 178, 181
Technical schools in Paris, 178,
179, 180
Temple, Dr., 92, 156, 229
Testimonials, dislike to giving,
20
Thorne, Mrs., 151
Times, The, 227
Tractarian Movement, interest
in, 6
Trollope, Adolphus, 234
Tyndall, Professor, 232
University extension, 120, 122,
123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128
University life, value of, 103
University of London, 102, 109,
110, 112, 118, 145, 225
University preachers in America,
170
University, Women's, 146, 147,
148
Vaughan, Cardinal, 159
Voysey, Eev. C., 92
Warburton, Canon, 67
Ward, Dr. Adolphus, 248
Welldon, Dr., 243
Wesleyan schools, 44, 254
Wilks, Emma. See Lady Fitch
Wilks. Mr. Joseph Barber, 13
Wilks, Eev. S. C M 13
Women, Council for Higher
Education of, 123
Women, education of, 130
' Women in National Education,'
161
Women on Boards of Guardians,
160
Women on Consultative Com-
mittee of Board of Education,
160
Women's colleges and halls,
155
Women's Training College,
Cambridge, 154, 158
Woodman, Mr., 3
Woods, Miss Alice, 158
Wordsworth, 230
York, 14, 23, 27, 86, 92, 93, 94
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, OUILDFORD.
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Mr. Edward Arnold's
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SIR JOSHUA FITCH.
an Account of bf8 %ifc anfc TKKorfc,
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VALVES AND VALVE GEAR
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types of engines, and include, amongst others, a link motion of the
Great Eastern Railway, the straight link motion of the London and
North-Western Railway, the Walschaert gear of the Northern of
France Railway, the Joy gear of the Lancashire and Yorkshire
Railway, the Sulzer gear, the Meyer gear, etc.
' No such systematic and complete treatment of the subject has yet been
obtainable in book form, and we doubt if it could have been much better done, or
by a more competent authority. The language is exact and clear, the illustra-
tions are admirably drawn and reproduced. ' Times.
A MANUAL OF PHARMACOLOGY.
By WALTER E. DIXON, M.A., M.D., B.Sc. LOND.,
D.P.H. CAMB.,
ASSISTANT TO THE DOWNING PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE,
EXAMINER IN PHARMACOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITIES OF CAMBRIDGE AND GLASGOW.
Demy 8vo. 155. net, cloth ; 145. net, paper.
This text-book, which is prepared especially for the use of students,
gives a concise account of the physiological action of Pharmacopoeia!
drugs. The subject is treated from the experimental standpoint,
and the drugs are classified into pharmacological groups. The text
is fully illustrated by original tracings of actual experiments and by
diagrams.
The author's aim throughout has been to cultivate the reasoning
faculties of the student and to subject all statements to experiment,
in the hope that pharmacology may thus be learnt like any other
science, and consist in something more than the mere committal to
memory of many disjointed and often unassociated facts, as it has
been too often in the past.
Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books 7
RACES OF DOMESTIC POULTRY.
By EDWARD BROWN, F.L.S.,
SECRETARY OF THE NATIONAL POULTRY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY ;
AUTHOR OF ' POULTRY KEEPING : AN INDUSTRY FOR FARMERS AND COTTAGERS,' ' INDUSTRIAL
POULTRY KEEPING,' ' PLEASURABLE POULTRY KEEPING,' ETC.
Crown ^to. With Illustrations. 6s. net.
This important and comprehensive work, by an admitted master
of his subject, will be welcomed by all who are interested in poultry-
keeping. Chapters I. and II. deal with the origin, history, and
distribution of domestic poultry, and with the evolution and classi-
fication of breeds ; the next ten chapters are devoted to the various
races of fowls ; Chapters XIII. to XV. treat of ducks, geese, and
turkeys. The remaining chapters are on external characters and
breeding. There are also Appendices on Nomenclature, Judging, etc
A FISHING CATECHISM
AND
A SHOOTING CATECHISM.
By COLONEL R. F. MEYSEY-THOMPSON,
AUTHOR OF ' REMINISCENCES OF THE COURSE, THE CAMP, AND THE CHASE.'
Two volumes. Foolscap Svo. 35. 6d. net each.
Lovers of rod and gun will welcome these valuable handbooks
from the pen of an admitted expert. The information given is abso-
lutely practical, and is conveyed, for the most part, in the form of
Question and Answer. As the result of some fifty years' experience,
the author seems to have anticipated every possible emergency, and
the arrangement is especially calculated to facilitate easy reference.
There are special chapters on fishing and shooting etiquette, and at
the end of each book is a chapter dealing with the legal side of the
subject.
' The questions are direct, and the answers equally direct ; it is difficult to
think of other questions which might have been put, so wide is the range covered
by query and reply; and, last and best recommendation of all for a book of this
kind, Colonel Meysey-Thompson recognises that no question must be ruled out
as too easy, or as being one of the things that every duffer knows.' County
Gentleman.
1 The whole handy, well-printed book is as full of information of the right
sort as an egg is of meat. It will delight alike the tyro and the expert, which no
book can do that is not thoroughly good.' Sportsman.
8 Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books
RECENT ADVANCES IN PHYSIOLOGY
AND BIO-CHEMISTRY.
CONTRIBUTORS I
BENJAMIN MOORE, M.A., D.Sc.,
JOHNSTON PROFESSOR OF BIO-CHEMISTRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL.
LEONARD HILL, M.B., F.R.S.,
LECTURER ON PHYSIOLOGY, THE LONDON HOSPITAL.
J. J. R. MACLEOD, M.B.,
PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY, WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY, CLEVELAND, U.S.A.
LATE DEMONSTRATOR OF PHYSIOLOGY, THE LONDON HOSPITAL.
M. S. PEMBREY, M.A., M.D.,
LECTURER ON PHYSIOLOGY, GUY'S HOSPITAL.
A. P. BEDDARD, M.A., M.D.,
ASSISTANT PHYSICIAN, LATE DEMONSTRATOR OF PHYSIOLOGY, GUY'S HOSPITAL.
752 pages. Demy 8vo. i8s. net, cloth; 175. net, paper.
This book, which is edited by Mr. Leonard Hill, consists of Lec-
tures on Physiological subjects selected for their direct clinical
interest, and designed to meet the requirements of advanced students
of Physiology. Professor Moore deals with Vital Energy, Ferments,
and Glandular Mechanisms ; Mr. Hill himself with the Atmosphere
in its Relation to Life, the Metabolism of Water and Inorganic Salts,
and the Metabolism of Fat ; Professor Macleod with the Metabolism
of the Carbohydrates, and of Uric Acid and the other Purin Bodies,
and with Haemolysis ; Dr. Pembrey with the Respiratory Ex-
change and Internal Secretion ; and Dr. Beddard with Lymph,
Absorption, and the Secretion of Urine.
NEW EDITION.
PRACTICAL PHYSIOLOGY.
By A. P. BEDDARD, M.A., M.D., J. S. EDKINS, M.A,, M.B.,
L. HILL, M.B., F.R.S., J. J. R. MACLEOD, M.B., AND M. S.
PEMBREY, M.A., M.D.
Demy Svo. Copiously illustrated. 125. 6d. net, cloth ;
us. 6d. net, paper.
Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books 9
NEW FICTION.
Crown 8vo. 6s. each.
THE LADY OF THE WELL.
By ELEANOR ALEXANDER,
AUTHOR OF 'LADY ANNE'S WALK,' 'THE RAMBLING RECTOR."
'It is a story of vivid imagination and great tenderness. . . . The thought
that pervades this romance is really fine, often touching the deepest chords. '
Morning Post.
' The book is altogether an extremely successful attempt to portray an ex-
ceedingly difficult subject, and we may congratulate the author on the mediaeval
atmosphere which she has contrived to impart into her story.' Spectator.
SECOND IMPRESSION.
HYACINTH.
By GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM,
AUTHOR OF 'THE SEETHING POT.'
' Of the political novels published in recent years few have compared in
interest with " The Seething Pot," in which the various contending forces in the
Ireland of to-day are illustrated and impersonated, not merely with considerable
literary skill and humour, but with a dispassionateness and self-effacement rare
in writers of fiction, and almost unprecedented where Ireland is the scene.
Mr. Birmingham continues this illuminating process in " Hyacinth," which must
be added to the list of books essential to the comprehension of the Irish
character, and in serious interest fully equals its predecessor. ' Spectator.
' The story is one of remarkable interest.' Athenceum.
' The faculty of keen observation which made " The Seething Pot" interesting
reappears with even a sharper satiric edge.' Saturday Review.
FOLLY.
By EDITH RICKERT,
AUTHOR OF 'THE REAPER.'
1 " Folly" is a novel of distinguished cleverness.' Standard.
' Miss Rickert has the gift of endowing her characters with that charm of
personality which adds so much to the reader's pleasure without detracting from
the power of her tale.' Review of Reviews.
SECOND IMPRESSION.
THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS.
By REGINALD J. FARRER,
AUTHOR OF 'THE GARDEN OF ASIA.'
io Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books
THREE LITTLE COOKS.
By LUCY CRUMP.
Square crown Svo. With Illustrations by Gertrude M. Bradley. 2s. 6d.
' No child who owns one of those precious possessions a miniature cooking
stove should be without this book. It contains many good recipes, adapted to
the conditions of a toy stove, and also much good advice, which may be followed
with advantage by those boys and girls who play at being cooks.' ChurchTimes.
POLITICAL CARICATURES, 1905.
By F. CARRUTHERS GOULD.
Super royal tfo. 6s. net.
NEW AND CHEAPER EDITIONS.
THE REMINISCENCES OF SIR
HENRY HAWKINS
(3Baron 3Brampton).
Edited by RICHARD HARRIS, K.C.,
AUTHOR OF ' ILLUSTRATIONS OF ADVOCACY,' ' AULD ACQUAINTANCE,' ETC.
Crown Svo. With Portrait. 6s.
In this edition a few of the more technically legal passages have
been omitted, but all the dramatic episodes and characteristic anec-
dotes remain untouched.
RED POTTAGE.
By MARY CHOLMONDELEY.
Crown Svo. 2s. 6d.
Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books n
ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ON
ECONOMIC QUESTIONS (1865-1893).
WITH INTRODUCTORY NOTES (1905).
By the RIGHT HON. VISCOUNT GOSCHEN.
Demy 8vo. 155. net.
' One of those rare and desirable works an economic treatise based on
practical and personal experience, and at the same time interesting and
readable. ' Manchester Guardian.
1 It is written in graphic and incisive language. Its qualities will, we are
convinced, appeal to many readers who would be deterred from studying more
formal and elaborate treatises, for they will find here complicated facts set forth
with great lucidity and directness. . . . They will feel that they are throughout
in close contact with the real circumstances of the actual situation.' Economic
Journal.
FINAL RECOLLECTIONS OF A
DIPLOMATIST.
By the RIGHT HON. SIR HORACE RUMBOLD, BART.,
G.C.B., G.C.M.G.,
AUTHOR OF ' RECOLLECTIONS OF A DIPLOMATIST ' AND ' FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS
OF A DIPLOMATIST.'
Demy Svo. 155. net, cloth ; 145. net, paper.
1 He appears to have met and known every remarkable man and woman ot
his time who was to be met with in Europe. This last volume is, indeed, like its
predecessors, a thoroughly fascinating study.' Daily Chronicle.
LORD HOBHOUSE:
A MEMOIR.
By L. T. HOBHOUSE, and J. L. HAMMOND,
AUTHOR OF ' MIND IN EVOLUTION.' AUTHOR OF ' C. J. Fox : A STUDY.'
Demy 8vo. With Portraits. 125. 6d. net.
'No more conscientious public servant than the late Lord Hobhouse ever
existed, and it is only right that the community on whose behalf he spent
laborious days should be able to appreciate his full worth. That end will be
agreeably accomplished by the readers of this compact and eloquent memoir.'
A then&um.
12 Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books
THE LIFE OF JOHANNES BRAHMS.
By FLORENCE MAY.
Two volumes. Demy 8vo. With Illustrations. 2 is. net, cloth;
2os. net, paper.
* There have been many valuable contributions to Brahms literature, but none
that has yet appeared is of equal importance with Miss May's volumes. 1 The
Times.
* Quite the most complete and comprehensive life of the master which has so
far been produced in this country.' Westminster Gazette.
' Bids fair to remain for many years to come the standard biography in the
English language.' Yorkshire Post.
A FORGOTTEN JOHN RUSSELL.
ffieing ^Letters to a dfcan of Business, 1724*1751.
Arranged by MARY EYRE MATCHAM.
Demy 8vo. With Portrait. 125. 6d. net.
4 A vivacious picture of society, mainly naval, in the reign of the second
George. John Russell appears to have been a distant connection of the Bedford
family. . . . Miss Matcham is to be congratulated on her judicious editing of
this fresh and pleasant volume. Her John Russell has been most tactfully rescued
from oblivion.' Athenaiim.
THEODORE OF STUDIUM :
HIS LIFE AND TIMES.
By ALICE GARDNER,
ASSOCIATE AND LECTURER OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ;
AUTHOR OF 'JULIAN THE PHILOSOPHER,' 'STUDIES IN JOHN THE SCOT,' 'ROME THE MIDDLE
OF THE WORLD,' ETC.
Demy 8vo. With Illustrations. IDS. 6d. net.
' Miss Gardner's study of Theodore is a piece of work well worth doing, nor is
it necessary in her case to add that it has been done well.' Outlook.
We would bear testimony once more to the care, erudition, and skill with
which the life of a remarkable man has been written. And the student, both of the
political and ecclesiastical history of that period, will be grateful for the material
here collected.' Church Times.
Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books 13
THE GREAT PLATEAU.
3Befng an account of ^Exploration in Central atbet, 1903, and of tbe
(Bartofc 3peoition, 1904*1905,
By CAPTAIN C. G. RAWLING,
SOMERSETSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY.
Demy Svo. With Illustrations and Maps. 155. net, cloth;
145. net, paper.
' Of exceptional value as a record of travel, and its interest is enhanced by
an admirable map and many exceedingly fine illustrations.' Standard.
IN THE DESERT.
By L. MARCH PHILLIPPS,
AUTHOR OF 'WITH RIMINGTON.'
Demy Svo. With Illustrations. 125. 6d. net, cloth ;
us. 6d. net, paper.
' A very fine book, of great interest and fascination, that is difficult to lay aside
until read at a sitting.' World.
'There are many that go to the desert, but few are chosen. Mr. March
Phillipps is one of the few. He sees, and can tell us what he has seen, and,
reading him, we look through his eyes and his sympathies are ours.' The Times.
TWO YEARS IN THE ANTARCTIC.
3&eii\Q a Barrative of tbe JJritisb Bational Antarctic BjpeWtfoiu
By LIEUTENANT ALBERT B. ARMITAGE, R.N.R.,
SECOND IN COMMAND OF THE 'DISCOVERY,' 1901-1904; AND OF THE JACKSON-HARMSWORTH
POLAR EXPEDITION, 1894-1897.
Demy Svo. With Illustrations and Map. 155. net, cloth ;
145. net, paper.
'A most entertaining work, written in a plain, straightforward style which
at once appeals to the reader. It is very nicely illustrated and furnished with an
excellent map.' Field.
14 Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books
FLOOD, FELL, AND FOREST.
By SIR HENRY POTTINGER, BART.
Two volumes. Demy 8vo. With Illustrations. 255. net.
' Sir Henry Pottinger was one of the pioneers amongst Englishmen who have
found in Norway a fascinating field of sport, and to these in particular his volumes
will appeal. He is at once picturesque and graphic, and to the sportsman in
general, and to the frequenter of Scandinavian homes of sport in particular, we
heartily commend the book.' Badminton Magazine.
THE QUEEN'S POOR.
3Lffe as tbeg ffnD it in Gown anD Country.
By M. LOANE.
Crown Svo. 6s.
4 It is a book which is not only a mine of humorous stories, quaint sayings, and
all that web of anecdote and quick repartee which sweetens a life at the best
limited and austere. It is also a study in which common-sense mingles with
sympathy in a record of intimate relationship with the problems of poverty.'
Daily News.
Sir ARTHUR CLAY, Bart., says of this book : ' I have had a good deal of ex-
perience of "relief " work, and I have never yet come across a book upon the
subject of the " poor " which shows such true insight and such a grasp of reality
in describing the life, habits, and mental attitude of our poorer fellow-citizens. . . .
The whole book is not only admirable from a common-sense point of view, but it is
extremely pleasant and interesting to read, and has the great charm of humour.'
SHORT LIVES OF GREAT MEN.
By W. F. BURNSIDE and A. S. OWEN,
ASSISTANT MASTERS AT CHELTHNHAM COLLEGE.
Crown 8vo. With Illustrations. 35. 6d.
Special Cheltonian Edition, including plan of Reredos and an Introduction
by the Rev. R. Waterfield, M.A. 45.
The Cheltenham College memorial of Old Cheltomans who fell
in the South African War takes the form of a reredos in the school
chapel, filled with forty-four figures illustrating certain aspects of
English history and representative men in different callings of life.
It has been felt that an account of these great men would be service-
able, not only to those who see these carved figures every day, but
to a larger number of readers, who would be glad to have in a com-
pendious form biographies of many of the leading men in English
history and literature. The list extends from St. Alban to Gordon,
and for the sake of convenience chronological order has been
adopted. Illustrations are given of eight typical personages.
Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books 15
THE WALLET SERIES OF HANDBOOKS.
The following five volumes are the new additions to this useful
series of handbooks, which range, as will be seen, over a wide field,
and are intended to be practical guides to beginners in the subjects
with which they deal.
Foolscap Svo., is. net per volume, paper ; 2s. net, cloth.
THE MANAGEMENT OF BABIES. By MRS. LEONARD
HILL.
ON COLLECTING MINIATURES, ENAMELS, AND
JEWELLERY. By ROBERT ELWARD, Author of ' On Collect-
ing Engravings, Pottery, Porcelain, Glass, and Silver.'
MOTORING FOR MODERATE INCOMES. By
HENRY REVELL REYNOLDS.
ON TAKING A HOUSE. By W. BEACH THOMAS.
COMMON AILMENTS AND ACCIDENTS AND
THEIR TREATMENT. By M. H. NAYLOR, M.B., B.S.
The following volumes have been already published :
ON COLLECTING ENGRAVINGS, POTTERY, PORCE-
LAIN, GLASS, AND SILVER. By ROBERT ELWARD.
ELECTRIC LIGHTING FOR THE INEXPERIENCED.
By HUBERT WALTER.
HOCKEY AS A GAME FOR WOMEN. With the New Rules.
By EDITH THOMPSON.
WATER-COLOUR PAINTING. By MARY L. BREAKELL
(' Penumbra ').
DRESS OUTFITS FOR ABROAD. By ARDERN HOLT.
16 Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books
NEW EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED.
COMMON-SENSE COOKERY.
3fot Bngltsb Ibousebol&s, witb awentg Menus worfcefc out in Detail.
By COLONEL A. KENNEY-HERBERT,
AUTHOR OF ' FIFTY BREAKFASTS,' ' FIFTY LUNCHES,' ' FIFTY DINNERS,' ETC.
Large crown 8vo. With Illustrations. 6s. net.
The author has so largely rewritten this edition that it is prac-
tically a new book. Besides being brought up to date with the
very latest ideas on the subject, it is much enlarged, and now
contains a number of attractive full-page illustrations.
NEW AND REVISED EDITION.
FOOD AND THE PRINCIPLES OF
DIETETICS.
By ROBERT HUTCHISON, M.D. EDIN., F.R.C.P.,
ASSISTANT PHYSICIAN TO THE LONDON HOSPITAL AND TO THB HOSPITAL FOR SICK CHILDREN,
GREAT ORMOND STREET.
Demy 8vo. With 3 Plates in colour and numerous Illustrations in
the text. 1 6s. net, cloth ; 155. net, paper.
ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
HISTORICAL TALES FROM
SHAKESPEARE.
By A. T. QUILLER-COUCH ( Q.'),
AUTHOR OF 'THE SHIP OF STARS,' ETC.
Crown Svo. With Illustrations from the Boy dell Gallery. 6s.
The value of this much-appreciated work will, it is believed, be
enhanced by the addition of sixteen selected illustrations from the
well-known Boy dell collection.
LONDON : EDWARD ARNOLD 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, W,
56474
353255
325