Of all the V.P.’s of my era, the most obtrusive was Mr. Anthony John Mundella. Everyone knows Tacitus’ estimate of Galba, that “by universal consent he was fit for empire, if he had not been an emperor.” But I doubt if even this faint praise could be given to Mundella. He was made Vice-President, we may suppose, to pacify the Birmingham League, to keep the fussy man himself quiet, to satisfy the advanced wing of the party. And it was generally conceded that no man ever in the office was more keenly interested in education; no man more anxious to do and say the right thing. At times he soared above earth, and won admiration for his absence of pretence, and his strenuous endeavours to carry out what he conceived to be the right policy. But no one could have thought him fit to govern. He had never held office before, and neither the manufacture of hosiery, nor the part which he had played in the local politics of Nottingham had fitted him for the difficult and delicate task which fell upon him. Men in the Office said he was a pulpit-cushion thumper, and nothing more: he was incapable of deciding a case submitted to him.
Moreover, as is often the case in similar circumstances, he could not work with men above him, or below him. It was told me by one in the secrets of the Office that the Secretary went one day in subdued fury to the Lord President with a paper in his hand. “Look,” he said, “what Mr. Mundella has said to me.” The noble earl read it, and said soothingly, “I assure you that this is nothing to what he says to me.”
The argument, if it can be so called, is a bad one; for a rude remark to a subordinate differs from a rude remark to a superior. But pity for the helpless chieftain stayed the other’s wrath.
On the retirement of Sir Francis Sandford, in 1884, Mundella determined to have a secretary after his own heart. Sir Francis had recommended the appointment of one of the ablest of the Inspectorate as his successor, and the Lord President had agreed: but when this was revealed to Mundella, he protested vehemently that the Board Schools would not be safe in such hands, and insisted on the appointment of Mr. Cumin, then an assistant secretary in the Office. The President adhered to his choice, and Mundella straight-way seized a piece of paper, wrote his resignation, and handed it to his superior officer. What could be done? It is easy to say with Dogberry, “Why, then, take no note of him, but let him go, and thank God that you are rid of—an undesirable person.” But the situation was difficult. Mundella would have given his reasons in the House, and would have stirred up the Radicals against the old Whigs: the Birmingham League and the Dissenters in both camps would have supported their Goliath against the Whig David: I think there was no remedy. Cumin was appointed.
It was not a good appointment; but if the new secretary did not justify his patron’s praises, he equally failed to justify his expectations of favouritism. The traditions of the Office require that the permanent staff shall treat all classes and sects of schools with equal hand; and though there were many willing to cast a stone at the Secretary, I cannot remember that he was ever accused of undue partiality to one type. There were times, whoever might be secretary, when the balance seemed to be depressed on one side or the other; but it was always explained by nods, and upheaval of the shoulder that pointed to the V.P.’s room, that THOSE FELLOWS were giving trouble. In the last few months a recently emancipated secretary, who employs his well-earned leisure in theological warfare, has informed us that he “puts Protestantism before politics.” I believe I am correct in saying that during his long period of service in Whitehall no one even suspected him of ecclesiastical prejudices.
This habit of mind Mundella could not understand. In office, as in business, he did not seem to run straight; but when financial troubles caused his downfall, men pitied him, because they thought his errors, there also, were errors of judgment rather than of moral sense.
Of other Vice-Presidents before the arrival of Sir John Gorst, I think Mr. Acland was the most demonstrative. He had been a clergyman in Priest’s Orders, but he “renounced them all,” and entered Parliament, and in 1892 was made Vice-President by Mr. Gladstone. It was said that the Premier was under the impression that his new Minister had never gone beyond Deacon’s Orders, and that, knowing that the abandonment of Priest’s Orders involved excommunication, he would with fuller knowledge have made another choice. Ecclesiastical law is one of the few subjects that I have never examined in, and I repeat the canonical proposition without any warranty. It may be a joke. When Mr. Gladstone is concerned, one must always remember the excellent rule laid down by a critic in the Times, when reviewing a book of Oxford anecdotes: “What one requires of a story (at Oxford) is not that it should be true, but that it should be suitable to the character of the man of whom it is told.” (I quote from memory.) Accepting the story with this reservation, I think it was open to the new Minister to retort that the change from Tory M.P. for Oxford to Radical M.P. for Mid Lothian more richly deserved the greater excommunication.
However that may be, the new V.P. had little sympathy with his former brethren. His zeal for education was great, but whether in Whitehall or in the West Riding it has always been the zeal of the tailless fox yearning to bite the well-tailed little ones. To us inspectors much of this fury was welcome. There were many schools which we had long been anxious to close on account of the defects of their buildings, and always hitherto, whether Tories or Radicals were in power, we were thwarted by My Lords. Now we began to hope. But it was not till November, 1893, that the V.P. succeeded in forging a weapon with which to smite his foes. In that month appeared the famous Circular 321, which demanded full information about the premises of every Public Elementary School, and we spent a busy year in compiling the answers. The mesh was narrow, and if we had been properly supported in Whitehall we should have netted all the offenders. But there never was any backbone to My Lords. Voluntary Schools and Board Schools for once went hand-in-hand: the backstairs of the Office crawled with protestants of all denominations: there ensued consternation, procrastination, prevarication. In some districts we kept the fire banked up, and in a later year, with the help of the Aid Grant,[18] we moved. But it required continual stoking. Excommunicated Mr. Acland may be, but many a child has to thank him for increased health and comfort; and I trust that when he comes to work off his sentence in Purgatory, he may be able to plead these good works as an equitable set off.
The last of the V.P.’s, and the only one that I ever saw, was Sir John Gorst. Nature had not designed him for the position of second fiddler; but the Lord President, finding that his understudy, when he got hold of the first fiddle, played out of tune and threw out the band, insisted on his keeping the lower place. This amused the House of Commons, and the Duke omitted to stipulate that Sir John never should
“With arms encumbered thus, or thus head shake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As, ‘Well, we know’; or, ‘There be, an if there might’;
Or such ambiguous giving out——”