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Christ Church, where he graduated in history and law in 1870, before taking up an assistant tutorship at Keble, while embarking on a course of preparation for ordination in the Anglican Church.4 His marriage in 1874, at the age of twenty-seven, to Frances Cunningham, the daughter of the High Church vicar of Witney, seemed to confirm his settled future in an Anglican High Church calling. In the mean time, Ellis, with his far humbler background, attended the non-denominational elementary school in the village of Llandderfel, before entering the old endowed grammar school at Bala and going on, in 1875, to the fledgeling university college at Aberystwyth.6 What brought Acland and Ellis together was partly the feeling each of them had for rural society, but mainly their common exposure to new ideas at Oxford, to which Ellis went up from Aberystwyth in 1880. He entered New College, having been advised by Principal Thomas Charles Edwards to choose 'a thoroughly English college' rather than Jesus, with its Welsh connections.7 In the mean time, Acland had fallen strongly under the influence of the new social philosophy which had been engaging some of Oxford's intellectual elite for more than a decade. That philosophy was the Idealism of T. H. Green and his young disciple Arnold Toynbee, whose Hegelian conception of 'community' as a moral, almost spiritual, entity, bonded by ties of mutual obligation, together with the rejection of atomistic individualism, had a powerful appeal for Acland.8 This, together with the romantic revivalism and sense of craftsmanship of Ruskin, Morris, and Burne-Jones, reinforced Acland's concern for declining rural communities and their welfare, and led him to embrace Green's concept of 'active citizenship' as the best means of creating a new social order on the basis of co-operation and social justice. Moreover, Acland embraced Green's view of education as the most potent moral force in society, the most valuable long-term instrument at its disposal for mobilizing the energies of individuals and communities for the Idealist goal of the common good.9 It is this view of education as it affected Wales that will be discussed in this study. 4See P. W. Evans, 'The Contribution of Arthur Herbert Dyke-Acland (1847 1926) to the Education System of England and Wales' (unpublished University of Manchester Ph.D. thesis, 1989), esp. ch. 1, 2. I have drawn extensively on this excellent thesis for details of Acland's early career. 'Ibid. 6Masterman, op.cit., pp. 31-45. 7T. I. Ellis, op.cit., p. 95. "For Idealism, see A. Vincent and R. Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford, 1984); see also P. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978), esp. pp. 22-27. 'See P. Gordon and J. White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers: The Influence of Idealism on British Educational Thought and Practice (London, 1979), pp. 69-88, 93ff.