What are the duties of a Senior, or Chief, or Divisional Inspector? (I have lived to see the three dynasties.) It is difficult to sum them up concisely. The professional reader knows them already: the unprofessional reader would not be interested. Briefly I may say, that he has to see that the District Inspectors and their staff do their work, and maintain the requisite standard of education; he has to advise the staff in all cases of difficulty; he has to hold enquiries in cases of dispute between the District Inspector and the local authority. Also he has to attend conferences at the Office, and to advise the Board “before any important change is made.” Lastly, he had in alternate years to compile a Blue Book report on the state of education in the Division. I may say at once that the two last duties gave me little or no trouble. When I resigned, there had been no conference for eighteen months, and no divisional reports have been required for five years. I cannot say that the conferences were profitable to the nation: in fact, so far as I remember, they were chiefly confined to questions of official organisation; but they gave one a convenient opportunity of meeting old colleagues at the expense of the Consolidated Fund. The Blue Book report--if I may quote Mr. Curdle[45]--“as an exquisite embodiment of the (Inspector’s) visions, and a realisation of human intellectuality, gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, is gone, perfectly gone.” I cannot say whether the Board suspected that no one read the reports; or whether in its positively Russian dread of individual opinion, it disliked the appearance in print of such crude ideas as might survive a triple censorship. So long as I was not asked to compile the hateful thing, I was content. The most important duty of the Divisional Chief has been forgotten. It was to preside over an annual conference of his suffragans, which began with discussion of educational topics of present interest, and ended with lunch. I shall always retain pleasant recollections of those spring meetings at Derby, when I sat at the hospitable board of my good old chief, Mr. Blandford, and his successors, and I did my best to carry on the tradition at Manchester. As for the “topics,” they served their turn. Then the “agenda paper” evolved the menu.