ABSTRACT
T He opening of the twentieth century, with the death of the Queen and the exasperating prolongation of the Boer War, was a depressing phase in British political and social life. The rising sap in the tree of education, too, was for the moment arrested. In 1899 Cockerton, the London district auditor, successfully challenged, on grounds of illegality, the growing practice of the London School Board of financing post-elementary education from the rates. Considerable confusion resulted, and it was three years before Balfour's great Education Act could sort out the tangle, set up a national framework for secondary instruction and release fresh stores of educational energy.
