Then followed married life at Rawdon near Bradford, with supreme
happiness at home, and many and growing interests in the manufacturing,
religious, and social life around the young wife. In 1861 William
Forster became member for Bradford, and in 1869 Gladstone included him
in that Ministry of all the talents, which foundered under the
onslaughts of Disraeli in 1874. Forster became Vice-President of the
Council, which meant Minister for Education, with a few other trifles
like the cattle-plague thrown in. The Education Bill, which William
Forster brought in in 1870 (as a girl of eighteen, I was in the Ladies'
Gallery of the House of Commons on the great day to hear his speech),
has been the foundation-stone ever since of English popular education.
It has always been clear to me that the scheme of the bill was largely
influenced by William Forster's wife, and, through her, by the
convictions and beliefs of her father. The compromise by which the
Church schools, with the creeds and the Church catechism, were
preserved, under a conscience clause, while the dissenters got their way
as to the banishment of creeds and catechisms, and the substitution for
them of "simple Bible-teaching," in the schools founded under the new
School Boards, which the bill set up all over England, has
practically--with, of course, modifications--held its ground for nearly
half a century. It was illogical; and the dissenters have never ceased
to resent the perpetuation of the Church school which it achieved. But
English life is illogical. It met the real situation; and it would never
have taken the shape it did--in my opinion--but for the ardent beliefs
of the young and remarkable woman, at once a strong Liberal and a
devoted daughter of the English Church, as Arnold, Kingsley, and Maurice
understood it, who had married her Quaker husband in 1850, and had
thereby been the innocent cause of his automatic severance from the
Quaker body. His respect for her judgment and intellectual power was