The day will come, as we shake our minds free from the old and stupid ideas about coercing each other, that we shall mock as much at the idea of state education as we are now learning to mock at the idea of state religion — when even a municipal organization of education will seem to us as absurd and grotesque an undertaking as a municipal organization of religion.
Auberon Herbert, letter to the editor, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, as reprinted in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885.