If I thought any manager of the many who befriended me would read what I write, I would bid him farewell; and for his consolation I would refer him to the opening sentences of Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his Dictionary: “It is the fate of those who toil ... to be rather driven by the fear of evil than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.” FOOTNOTES: [20] ‘Moithered’ equivalent to ‘harassed’ or ‘embarrassed,’ but much easier to spell. In Norfolk it is ‘mĩthered’. [21] In the ’nineties annual inspections in a given month, with formal notice to the managers sent at least ten days in advance, were discontinued, and ‘visits without notice,’ paid at any time of the year, were substituted. The result was, that the managers did not know of our presence in their schools, and, unless we sent for them, we saw no one. CHAPTER XVI SCHOOL BOARDS “Allowing him a breath, a little scene To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks.” _Richard II._ The object of the Education Act of 1870 was to supply all England with efficient schools. If voluntary effort failed, special machinery was devised “not to supplant, but to supplement.” Purists objected that “supplement” was a vile misuse of a noun as a verb. On the analogy of “complete,” “complement,” it should be “supplete”; but the nation shrugged its shoulders. This machinery was summed up in the phrase “School Board”; and for thirty-two years the School Board was the idol of one party and the bugbear of another. It had the same strange effect on the morals of men that is attributed to horses. It is said that men, who in the ordinary affairs of life are honest, truthful, and temperate, lose all control over these qualities when they are concerned in the sale or purchase of a horse. And so it was with these Boards. When a question arose of the formation of a School Board, the parties on each side lapsed into heathenism; heathenism of a low type. Distorted figures and facts poured in at Whitehall, and were eventually forwarded to the Inspector “for report, and observations”; and if it had not been an unofficial act, H.M.I. would have blushed as he read them. “And then I saw what I had never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing,” says Plato in his _Republic_. There was one particular combatant, a buttress and eke a pillar of his denomination, a philanthropist, and an educational missionary, who, when any question of School Boards arose, exhibited so much of what a certain Lord Justice called “the inaccuracy of Ananias” that I had to warn the Education Department to allow him a special discount. He was happy in the opportuneness of his death; for he did not live to see the Act of 1902, which destroyed School Boards and thus took away the occupation alike of iconolaters and iconoclasts.