him. He possessed just the qualities necessary to give him a commanding position in university affairs. A man of real learning, he was also a man of affairs, with a wide knowledge of the world outside Oxford; holding strong opinions himself, he was invariably courteous and tactful in expressing them, and patient of those who honestly differed from him; precise and orderly in his habits of mind, he was completely free from pedantry. For the first eighteen years of his wardenship he was a resident in Oxford, a frequent speaker in congregation and convocation, an active member of numerous boards and delegacies, a sincere, if cautious, friend of university reform. In addition to the multifarious duties of his office he voluntarily undertook from 1886 to 1898 the tuition, in law, of undergraduates of Trinity College. It was also during these busy years that he produced the works of legal literature which are his chief claim to public remembrance; he published The Principles of the English Law of Contract in 1879; part I of The Law and Custom of the Constitution in 1886; and part II of the same work in 1892.
In 1898 Anson became vice-chancellor of the university, but he held the office for six months only; for in April 1899 a vacancy occurred in the parliamentary representation of the university, and his friends urged him to come forward in the unionist interest. He had already made one unsuccessful attempt to enter parliament, as liberal candidate for West Staffordshire in 1880; but even at that time his liberalism had been rather that of Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen than that of Mr. Gladstone, and in 1886 he had been one of the minority who seceded from their party on the question of Home Rule. Anson had abandoned his political ambitions, though not his keen interest in contemporary politics; and he saw that at the age of fifty-four a political career of the first rank was hardly open to him. He was elected without opposition, and continued to represent the university in parliament until his death. He proved himself an ideal university member, and was moreover admirably equipped, by his researches into the history of parties and by his unrivalled knowledge of the working of the constitution, to play a useful part in the counsels of his party; but he lacked some of the qualities necessary to the successful party leader. His voice was somewhat weak for public speaking; his physique had never been robust; his political opinions, though strong, were never extreme. Certainly his best parliamentary work was done on subjects that fall more especially within the province of a university burgess rather than on general political questions; and on the former, as the House soon recognized, he spoke with authority.
In the summer of 1902 Anson was appointed parliamentary secretary to the Board of Education, a position which at once brought him into the forefront of the controversy aroused by Mr. Balfour's Education Bill of that year. In retrospect it is now generally admitted that this Bill laid well and truly a foundation for the subsequent development of public elementary education; but at the time certain proposals in it, particularly those for giving rate-aid to the voluntary schools, were bitterly resented by a large number of nonconformists in the country, and were opposed with all the arts of parliamentary obstruction by a section of the opposition in the House. The controversy was discreditable to the extreme partisans on both sides, who displayed a narrow sectarian rancour in which the real interests both of religion and of education seemed to be forgotten. Anson, though he enjoyed the administrative work of his office and entered with zest into the parliamentary struggle, could not be altogether happy in such an atmosphere. Moreover his office was a subordinate one without a seat in the Cabinet; and the policy for which he was responsible in the House of Commons was not in all respects what he would have framed himself; indeed the Bill was already in committee when he took office. In the following year his principal business was the London Education Bill, with which also he was far from satisfied. He remained at the Board of Education until the resignation of the Balfour ministry in 1905, engaged mainly in the work of administrative reorganization entailed by the new Acts, and in the ungrateful task of dealing with the ‘passive resistance’ movement which followed the attempts to enforce the Act of 1902 in some parts of the country. By the time he left office he had rendered services of great value to the country and to his party, for which, by an oversight of the party leaders, resented more by his friends than by himself, he received no public recognition; and it was not till 1911 that he received the belated honour of a privy councillorship at the coronation of King George V.
During the remainder of Anson's life his party was in opposition. He took a
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