No country has ever delivered primary and secondary education to the majority of its children without financing it mainly through taxes. In the eighteenth century and part of the nineteenth, the leading countries passed up chances to capture the gains from public schooling of the masses. In Britain and the Netherlands, the payoffs from basic schooling already promised high rates of return, privately and socially, partly by interacting with the rise of commerce. Yet these two leaders delayed for at least a century and a half, partly because of church-school issues and more fundamentally because those with political voice resisted paying taxes to educate the children of others.