until 1833 was the work already being performed by voluntary agencies approved, by the grant of an annual sum of £20,000 to assist in the erection of school buildings. Not until 1839 was there any recognition of the national responsibility for primary education. In that year, a committee of the Privy Council was appointed to superintend the application of grants for educational purposes. This was the forerunner of the Education Department to be established in 1856. Roebuck in 1833 had failed to carry a resolution in the Commons in favour of universal compulsory education. On the eve of the Education Act of 1870, it was computed that there were nearly as many children without any kind of schooling as there were attending all the state-aided and private schools put together. So slowly had education advanced. But, whilst Parliament was engaged in repressing or ignoring educational demands, or debating whether it was wise or safe that the commonalty should be educated at all, the people, headed by those who had faith in an educated nation, were establishing the requisite machinery for themselves. There had been elementary schools of a sort in existence in most parts of the country for nearly a century. The academies set up by the Dissenters after the Toleration Act, the charity schools of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the schools founded by the Methodists and the Society of Friends, provided a general education based primarily on the principle of moral and religious instruction. Many of these schools catered for grown-up persons as well as children; the Sunday Schools, for instance, which sprang up after 1780, taught reading and sometimes writing to the illiterate of all ages. There were also private schools in the towns and many villages where the rudiments were imparted, unsatisfactorily, for a few pence. These organized efforts were mainly the work of middle-class evangelicals and philanthropists intent on the moral and religious improvement of the people. But new motives came into play in the new century, and the people themselves began to take an active part in the movement, with far-reaching results. Political agitation might be repressed, but an intellectual awakening could not be extinguished. Knowledge was demanded for its own sake; it was demanded also for economic reasons. The artisan who saw wonderful mechanical inventions enabling him to perform his operations with undreamt ease and efficiency, or depriving him of his job, was roused to an intense interest in science and a desperate desire to fit himself for a place in the new industrial order. The country was flocking into the towns; the major part of the population was becoming industrial. Education was perceived to be a necessity of life, and a necessity that concerned, not merely the rising generation, but even more momentously the adult workman. A passionate demand for education was faced with a sporadic