administrative genius and indomitable energy. He showed himself a great constructive organizer, insistent on intelligible classification and clear definition of aims, but not doctrinaire in adherence to any preconceived plan or formula. He had a great sense of realities, and though revolutionary when he was convinced that pulling down was a necessary preliminary to rebuilding, he often displayed a tolerant and tentative opportunism. The impulse of his administration and the ideals which inspired it spread very widely in the country, and during his term of office the planning and provision of public education, and particularly of secondary and higher education, made large advances, and access to it was greatly facilitated. The period was by no means free from polemics, and a lively controversy over a matter of no intrinsic importance, coupled with the need for a man of outstanding ability to take charge of a new enterprise, occasioned Morant's departure from the Board of Education in 1911 and his transference to the post of chairman of the National Health Insurance Commission.
For the next eight years Morant's work had two aspects. The outstanding practical achievements were the initiation of the payment of insurance contributions, the provision of sanatorium benefit (July 1912), and the general practitioner service (January 1913). Morant had more at heart the wide potentialities, realized in the European War, of the system of national aid for medical research, founded in 1913 on principles which he elaborated, and of a closer interrelation between the whole medical profession and the public service. Above all, he was increasingly absorbed in the plan, which was in his mind at least from 1907, when the school medical service came into being, of a redefinition, long overdue, of the functions both of central and of local authorities concerned with public health. He saw its first stage accomplished in the passing of the Ministry of Health Act in June 1919, and in July he became first secretary of the new department. The means and the man had been secured for the more important task of formulating proper relationships between the separate authorities locally responsible. His knowledge and appreciation of the difficulties were unequalled; it was a disaster to the cause of good government that time was not left him to overcome them.
Thus in seventeen out of the twenty-five years of his official life Morant conducted three large government departments. The Board of Education he entirely remodelled, adjusting it to the new division of responsibility between the central and local authorities, and making it capable of giving and receiving stimulus for a great expansion of the service of public education. The National Health Insurance Commission he organized from the beginning; and he then passed on to the business of consolidating health functions and local government functions and constructing a new instrument of government.
The work actually done by Morant for the public services of education and health cannot be related particularly or in concrete form so as to be intelligible to those who are not intimately acquainted with the machinery of the departments in which he was engaged. The stages of design and action between the big ideas and the practical details are numerous—and for Morant no idea was too big and no detail too small. It was not without good reason that in 1917 he was asked to serve on the committee on the machinery of government. To Morant administration was a great adventure. He had a passion for making the instruments of public service more effective, and was consumed and destroyed by it. There was no intermittence in his volcanic energy. He knew no rest and enjoyed no leisure. If opportunities presented themselves he took them; if they did not, he made them. His methods were quite unorthodox and they challenged criticism from which he never shrank. He was ambitious not of his own advancement but of establishing the dominance of the ideas which dominated him. He was impatient of opposition to them, and prone to suspect that criticism and advocacy of different methods concealed hostility to his principles. But once he was sure that his colleagues and subordinates were loyally working for the ends which he set before himself and them, no one was more generous in welcoming their criticism, in leaving them a free hand if they came up to his standard of ability and industry, and in giving them full credit for their achievement. Underlying all superficial characteristics, and reinforcing an amazing dialectical quickness, ingenuity, and grasp of detail, there was a solid core of large and simple devotion to ideals of public service, which compelled respect and commanded devoted friendship and service. The force, variety, and complexity of his character were to his contemporaries a constant source of interest, admiration, or wonder. His pre--
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