Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/546

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HART.

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and had taken a leading part, con- jointly with Mr. W. H. Smith, in founding the " Bishop of London's Fund." To the first London School Board he was returned for West- minster (1873), and he presided over the statistical committee appointed by that body to investi- gate the educational wants of the Metropolis. In Feb., 1874, he was appointed Vice-President of the Council of Education, and for four years he represented that Depart- ment in the House of Commons. He brought in the Education Act of 1876 and various Revised Codes. In 1878, when the office of Chief Secretary for Ireland became vacant, the Earl of Beaconsfield twice offered it to Viscount Sandon, who, however, refused it for family reasons ; but shortly afterwards his lordship accepted the post of Presi- dent of the Board of Trade, vacant by the resignation of Mr. Adderley, who was raised to the House of Peers, April, 1878. He went out of office with his colleagues in April, 1880. Viscount Sandon suc- ceeded to the title of Earl of Har- rowby on the death of his father' (Nov. 19, 1882). He married, in 1861, Lady Mary Frances Cecil, eldest daughter of the second Marquis of Exeter.

HART, Ernest, born in June, 1836, was educated at the City of London School, where he became Captain and I^mbert Jones Scholar at a very early age. Subsequently he entered the school of medicine attached to St. George's Hospital, where he attained the position of first prizeman in every class. He then obtained the post of Oph- thalmic Surgeon and Lecturer on Ophthalmology at St. Mary's Hos- pital Medical School, practising for some years as a surgeon, and he was the author of a method of treatment of aneurism. For several years Mr. Hart was co-editor of the Lancet, and in 1866 was selected as editor of the British Medical Journal by the council of the British Medical Asso-

ciation. For several years Mr. Hart has devoted himself to public work in connection with questions of social and sanitary progress. He is editor of the Sanitary Record and the London Medical Record, Chairman of the National Health Society, Chairman of the Smoke Abatement Committee, and Chairman of the Parliamentary Bills Committee of the British Medical Association. As Honorary Secretary of the Workhouse Infirmaries Association in 1866-7, he rendered great public services in exposing, in concert with others, the defective arrange- ments for the sick poor in work- houses ; and in an article on the "Hospitals of the State," published in the Fortnightly Review of that year, Mr. Hart laid down a series of propositions for the creation of asylums for the sick, which were subsequently embodied in the Me- tropolitan Asylums Act (1867). In 1868 Mr. Hart took steps to investi- gate the extent and methods by which a system of criminal "baby farming" was then carried on. The publication of these reports led eventually to the formation of a Society for the Protection of Infant Life. A select committee of the House of Commons was appointed in 1870 to consider the question, and the Infant Life Pi-o- tection Act was the result. As Chairman of the National Health Society Mr. Hart called attention to the desirability of a scientific study of the means of lessoning the excessive production of smoke in great cities. A committee was nominated for the puri)Ose which was joined by other organizations, especially the Kyrle Society, and a joint committee for the abatement of smoke was formed, which secui'ed public attention to the subject, and organized an exhibition of inventions for the purpose at the South Ken- sington Museum (1881). In 1876 Mr. Hart summoned a meeting at his private residence, which resulted in the fonnation of an Association

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