Abstract
BY the death of SIR ROBERT MORANT at the early age of fifty-seven the Civil Service loses one of its ablest and most remarkable members. His great powers of organisation found full scope for their exercise when he was, in 1902, appointed Secretary of the recently created Board of Education. The appointment was well merited, for it was to his indefatigable industry in supplying material, to his skill in dealing with details, and to his ingenuity in overcoming difficulties that the Education Bill of 1902 was safely carried through Parliament. As permanent head of the Board of Education his restless energy and ceaseless activity bore down all opposition, and made him ready at all costs to carry out his own ideas. Organisation was indeed with him a ruling passion, and the smooth working of a complicated machine tended to become more important than the purpose the machine was intended to serve. During the ten years that he held the post of Secretary he served under five different Presidents, and the rapid succession of his temporary chiefs was not altogether unconnected with his own remarkable tenacity of purpose and skill in carrying it into effect. While his undoubted talents and magnificent powers of work have thus left their mark on the educational system of the country, it still remains to be seen if the vast and expensive machinery he called into existence will be more of a help than a hindrance in the development of our national education. In 1912, on the appointment of Mr. J. A. Pease as I President of the Board of Education, Sir Robert Morant was promoted to the chairmanship of the English Commission formed under the National Health Insurance Act. He lived to see the early opposition to this Act gradually die away, and the Act itself become part of a great scheme of health legislation. To this Commission he devoted the same power of organisation and intensity of effort, and his early death is probably largely owing to his unsparing use of these great talents in the public service.
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B., C. [Obituaries]. Nature 105, 76 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/105076a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/105076a0