ABSTRACT
In 1902, the Commons debated the government’s new Education Bill on the day the South African War ended. It was an apt coincidence. Prophets used the new century as an occasion to consider the ‘breakers’ ahead and were not very con fident. Prince George and others urged the country to ‘wake up’. Asquith noted that the ‘undisputed hegemony’ in trade had come to an end. The country was handicapped in the struggle for commercial survival by what Rosebery described as ‘the badness of our educational system’.1 Sadler, a civil servant with knowl edge of the American and German educational systems, thought that the surviv al of empire depended upon ‘sea power and school power’. In 1899, a Board of Education had replaced the former Education Committee of the Privy Council, but the government had jibbed at granting it ‘control’ over education(215).
