Incidentally the rooms would be used for day-school purposes: in this way the repairs of the fabric, and a good deal of the gas and coal bills, and cleaning expenses would be provided for; and if a really energetic schoolmaster could be found to farm the school, he would certainly relieve the managers of any financial liability, and might even be induced to pay a comfortable rent, thereby strengthening the Cause. A very convenient addition to the scheme was to build the school underneath a chapel, more or less in a basement--this economised space. For some years the plan worked well. Then trouble arose, as new inspectors arose, and propounded startling theories of health and comfort. Some men went so far as to assert that a schoolroom 34 feet wide, with four rows of desks on either side of a central gangway--“double-banked” is the technical name--was intolerably noisy: and that classrooms, which, even if cleared of the cupboards, and tea-urns, held only twenty-five children, were insanitary when sixty-five were black-holed in them. But the managers were very powerful, and the school-farmers (lineal descendants of the Syrian _publicani_) commanded many votes. Lancashire and Cheshire M.P.’s wrote private letters to the Vice-President denouncing the misplaced zeal of the Inspector: or they called at the Office and talked to the Secretary. All the powers of obstruction were used. The Roman Catholics kept an Archbishop, a Duke, and an Earl in readiness: “With belted sword and spur on heel They quitted not their harness bright, Neither by day, nor yet by night,” and the Wesleyans had their doughty champion at the Westminster Training College, who “Carved at the meal With gloves of steel, And he drank the red wine through the helmet barred.” These flocked to the Office, and the Secretary for the time being threw all his children to the wolves, on condition that the wolves went away. Do you call this exaggeration? Well, I will not insist on the barred helmet; and the “red wine” may have been toast and water. But for the rest, the story is true in essentials. In 1903 I was taken by a colleague to a Wesleyan school in one of the cotton towns, and was shown the buildings which, in a former year, Mundella, when Vice-President of the Department, had denounced to the managers: he had added the offensive remark, in the presence of the District Inspector, that he “could not understand how H.M. Inspector allowed such a building to be recognised.” That official placidly murmured, “I will tell you about that downstairs,” and when they were outside, he said, “I have done all I could to get the place shut up, but your Office has always blocked me.” Did Mundella go by an early train to Whitehall to insist on immediate justice? “That,” continued my colleague, “was twenty-five years ago, and the school has gone on ever since.”