proposition of the defeated school law it is necessary to refer to a series of acts dealing with this problem. The reform law of 1832, as summed up by Green, "took away the right of representation from 56 decayed or rotten boroughs, gave the 143 members they returned to counties or large towns which as yet sent no members to Parliament, established a £10 householder qualification for voters in boroughs, and extended the county franchise to leaseholders and copyholders." The new privileges accelerated the growth of the civic spirit in large towns and led directly to the municipal corporations act of 1835, which, to quote again from Mr. Green, "restored to the inhabitants of towns those rights of self-government of which they had been deprived since the fourteenth century." The towns, or, as they are technically termed, municipal boroughs,1 became, as we have seen, school districts under the law of 1870. Subsequent laws, especially that of 1882, have amended and extended the powers conferred upon the boroughs by the act of 1835. These laws, however, only reached a single factor of the problem of local government. There remained to be dealt with a bewildering maze of areas, authorities, privileges, and responsibilities. The situation is indicated-to describe it would be impossible-by the following passages in an article by Mr. Thring: "Local government," he says, "is perhaps the most difficult problem which presents itself for solution to the English statesman. Take one county alone for an example. The county of Somerset contains 497 parishes, 11 boroughs, 22 unions, 10 local government districts, 17 rural sanitary districts, 66 school-board districts, besides numerous highway districts. Each of these divisions is governed by a separate body with distinct powers, and elected, with but few exceptions, by separate constituencies, separate modes of voting, and at different times of year. Multiply these authorities by 52, the number of counties in England-and bear in mind that a scheme of local government involves a knowledge of the particulars of each of the above-mentioned authorities, and in many cases an alteration in their status-and some idea may be formed of the difficulties to be overcome." After enumerating in a summary form 18 local authorities, the same article continues: "Such is a bird's-eye view of the whole field of local government. If depicted in a map, the areas form an entangled mass of interlacing boundaries, and when it is remembered that each area is a separate little kingdom with its governing body, its administrative officers, its taxation, overlapping and conflicting with each other, requiring separate elections with different franchises and expensive registration, the reform of such a system would seem to require from its complexity the genius of a local government Moltke." 2 'Boroughs are of two kinds: (1) A corporate town possessing a regularly organized municipal government and special privileges conferred by royal charter, usually called a municipal borough. A town having the right to send one or more representatives to Parliament, usually called a parliamentary borough. (Century Dictionary.) Nineteenth Century, March, 1888. In 1888 a local-government act was passed dealing with the whole subject. It has been reenforced by subsequent laws, especially that of 1894, but it concerns us here to note only that it made the county the unit of local administration, and included in that term a certain number of boroughs, denominated county boroughs. Altogether 126 administrative areas (65 counties, 61 county boroughs) were constituted. The boroughs included, practically, all the cities of England with populations of 100,000 and upward, and a few whose populations were less than 100,000, the limit being 50,000. London was treated separately as a county. Intense opposition to the law of 1888 was manifested at the time by boroughs whose population fell below 50,000, and it was the renewal of opposition from this quarter that wrecked the late education bill. Following the precedent established in municipal boroughs, the governing authority in the counties and county boroughs was made an elected council. These councils were brought into the category of educational authorities by legislation of 1889, authorizing them to levy a tax, not exceed ing a penny in the pound, for the support of technical schools, and that of 1890, placing at the disposal of the councils the surplus from the duties on liquors, with the privilege of applying the same to technical education. This interest lies outside the province of elementary education, but it brought the councils into direct contact with the boards that had developed higher grade or secondary departments, and increased the complications between educational affairs and local administration. Since 1870 several laws have been passed dealing with elementary education, but none of these have departed from the principles of action established by the Forster law. Their purpose has been to extend and strengthen the operations of that law; thus the law of 1876 provided a machinery, viz, "school-attendance committees," to enforce school attendance where there were no school boards. The law of 1891, providing for the remission of fees, was intended to increase school attendance and to prolong the average period, and such in fact has been its effect. The characteristic principles of the policy established in 1870, namely, the free expansion of local effort, the uniform and impartial exercise of central supervision, the prohibition of sectarian instruction in board or public schools, were attacked for the first time by the recent bill. Its proposals, tendencies, and fate will be best understood from speeches and articles which it evoked. These also afford an intimate view of the present status of popular education in England and of those complicated relations to local administration which have been indicated in this introductory survey. At the present time school boards have jurisdiction over nearly 20,000,000 of the population of England and Wales, leaving 10,000,000 to the oversight of schoolattendance committees. THE ENGLISH EDUCATION BILL OF 1896. The provisions of the bill as summarized below will suffice for an understanding of the references in the speeches and articles cited. With respect to the provision as to religious instruction (clause 27 of the bill proper), it may be premised that the impossibility of carrying it in the original form was made evident from the first. The following is a summary of the proposed bill: (1) The setting up in each county and county borough of "a paramount educational authority," to be drawn mainly from the town and county councils. (2) The devolving upon this authority of the general control, right of inspection, and grant-dispensing powers, already possessed by the educational department. (3) The creation of a new "special aid grant" of 4 shillings per child in attendance at all voluntary schools and in attendance at school-board schools now receiving the special assistance provided under section 97 of the act of 1870 (number of such board schools about 125). (4) The abolition of the seventeen-and-six penny limit. (See p. 104.) (5) The exemption of elementary schools from rating (property tax). (6) The provision of a public audit of accounts in all schools receiving the "special-aid grant." (7) The granting of powers to the educational authorities to lend money to voluntary schools upon the security of the school buildings. (8) The absolute application of the surplus from the duties on spirits to educational purposes. (9) The power of veto upon any additional school-board expenditure caused by increases in the cost of "maintenance" to rest with town, county, or district councils, as the case may be, and the fixing of a limit to the amount per capita which schools should be allowed to spend. (10) The removal of the work of carrying out the compulsory clauses of the act (12) Opportunity for the federation of schools by districts or denominations for the conduct of the schools and the administration of the grant. (13) Permissive powers to school boards to transfer their organized science or higher grade schools to the care of the new educational authority. (14) The age for juvenile labor to be raised to 12 (present age 11 years); and (15) The extension of the Cowper-Temple clause of the act of 1870, so as to give the parent not only the right to withdraw his child from religious instruction, but to have facilities offered him for the teaching of his child during the hour of religions instruction in the specific denominational tenets of his own faith. [Cited from Schoolmaster, April 4, 1896.] The speech of Sir John Gorst in presenting the bill is reproduced here in full as being the strongest statement on the part of the Government. The text used is from the report in the Schoolmaster1 of April 4, and the head lines introduced by the paper are preserved as affording a ready index to the context. SPEECH OF SIR JOHN GORST ON PRESENTING THE BILL. Before, sir, I describe the bill which the Government are asking the House to be allowed to introduce, perhaps the House will allow me to mention some of the difficulties in education which the wisdom of Parliament will have to meet. 'The Schoolmaster is the organ of the National Union of Elementary Teachers, edited by a prominent leader of the progressive school party, Mr. Macnamara. 2 Vice-president of the education department. THE DISABILITY UNDER WHICH THE VOLUNTARY SCHOOLS WORK. There is first the difficulty of voluntary schools. Last year the voluntary schools educated 2,445,812 children, as against 1,879,218 educated in the board schools; or, to put the matter in a more popular form, of every seven children educated by the State, three were educated in board schools and four in the voluntary schools. Whether or not the existence of the voluntary schools is an advantage to the State is a matter of controversy. I am one of those who believe that it is of advantage, because they tend to infuse independence, originality, and variety into our national education, and, to some extent, counteract that tendency to uniformity and rigidness which is the usual characteristic of a State system of education. But whatever view may be taken, it is not of great importance for practical statesmen, because the voluntary schools are there, and there seems very little prospect of their disappearing within any definite time. The Roman Catholics boast-and with truth-that they have never surrendered a single one of their schools to a board, and that those schools which have been discontinued since 1870 have been discontinued in consequence of the fluctuations of population. In 1870 the Church of England had 844,334 children in its schools; in 1895 it had 1,850,545. The subscriptions, which were in 1870 £329,846, were in 1895 £640,406. The little comfort which some people derive from the reflection that, though these subscriptions have enormously increased, they have not increased proportionately to the number of children educated has been dispelled by the results of the last year, for, whereas in 1894 the subscriptions to Church of England schools amounted to 6s. 8d. per child, in 1895 they amounted to 6s. 10дd. Besides this, the Church of England boast of having spent in buildings between 1870 and 1895 a sum of £7,375,402. The Roman Catholics and a very large part of the members of the Church of England make it a point of conscience that their children should be educated by teachers of their own denomination; and it would be impossible to force those children out of their own schools into the board schools without being guilty of a piece of religious intolerance which the people of England in these enlightened days would never consent to. THE COST OF REPLACING THEM. But there is another lower, but very solid, obstacle to the disappearance of the voluntary schools, and that is the cost of replacing them. I have asked our professional advisers to make some estimate of what this cost would be. I am advised that there are 3,620,805 places in voluntary schools which would have to be reprovided. As far as the best experience goes, the cost to the country for every place provided in board schools is £13 8s. 8d. That includes London, where the cost is very high. In London the cost is £20 9s. 4d. per child; and, if you exclude London, the cost in the provinces of England and Wales is £11 5s. 10d. per child. My advisers say that it would be much cheaper to provide for those 3,000,000 children than it has been for those who have been provided for already. There would be, presumably, a number of voluntary schools which could be had extremely cheap, and I am advised that the sum of £7 per head would be a fair and not excessive estimate of the cost. At that rate it would cost the people of this country £25,345,635 to provide schools for the children now being educated in the voluntary schools. Now, how much does it cost to maintain these schools? In the first place the subscriptions would have to be replaced by the rates, and that would cost £836,000. It is notorious that the expenditure in the voluntary schools is very much below that in the board schools, and that difference would have to be made up out of the rates. That would amount to £1,373,351. Further, you would have to provide for the correspondence of the different schools, which is now done gratis by the managers; and it is not excessive to say that this administration would cost £5 a school all round, which would add another £72,420 to the cost. That makes altogether for the annual maintenance of these children a sum of £2,282,199, and that allows nothing for repairs and improvements. It seems to me that this capital expenditure of £25,000,000 and this annual expenditure of £2,225,000 is a very solid obstacle to the abolition of the voluntary schools. I think, therefore, as far as practical statesmanship is concerned, that the question which this House has to consider is not whether it will abolish the voluntary schools, but whether they are efficient for the education of the people; and, if not efficient, how they can be best made so. There is no doubt that some of the voluntary schools are as good as any schools in the country. I have made inquiries from the inspectors, and the advice which they give me is this-that most of the voluntary schools in the poorest part of the great cities labor under financial dfficulties, and especially is that so with respect to the Roman Catholic schools. Those schools are supported some by religious orders, frequently by begging appeals, by sales of work, by concerts, and by subscriptions of the very poorest people. And the provision per head of the scholars in these schools which the managers are able to make is far below that which is provided in the board schools in the same great cities. They are further oppressed by the great rise of salaries which has taken place of recent years. I have before me the case of a large school at Westminster, with the same average attendance, where the cost of salaries has risen in six years from £605 to £974. I have the case of another school at Salford in which, in the same six years and with the same average attendance, the salaries have risen from £981 to £1,282. THE "INTOLERABLE STRAIN" AND WHO BEARS IT. If you take a survey of the whole country you will find that the sum devoted to the maintenance of children in voluntary schools amounts to £1 18s. 114d. per child, as against £2 10s. 1 d. per child in the board schools. That makes a difference of 11s. 24d. per child. And this difference is almost entirely represented by a lower payment to the teaching staff, for the difference in the cost of the teaching staff in the voluntary schools and the board schools is 9s. 44d. per child. This difference, which is so great over the whole extent of the Kingdom, is greater still in the great cities. In London the difference is no less than 19s. 94d., in Liverpool 13s. 7d., in Manchester 11s. 7d., and in Leeds 12s. 1d. The result of this difference in the teaching staff in the schools is this: In the first place all teachers in voluntary schools are lower paid than the corresponding teachers in the board schools. Take them man for man and with the same number of children, and you will find all round that the head teachers in the voluntary schools are far lower paid than the head teachers in the board schools. Then for assistant teachers they have cheaper and less-qualified teachers. As everyone knows, a concession was made several years ago which allowed schools to have a young woman of upward of 18, and approved by the inspector, without any specific qualification at all, as an assistant in schools, and that kind of assistant has increased with most marvelous and extraordinary rapidity. There is also this very year a concession made in the Code allowing the head teacher in small country schools to be a person possessed of less qualifications. It is a very bad arrangement, in my opinion. My poverty, and not my will, consented to it. And then the voluntary schools have to use to a very great extent that most extravagant form of economy, child labor. Besides having less-qualified teachers, voluntary schools are, as compared with board schools, understaffed, that is to say, they have fewer teachers to the same number of children. They only just comply with the minimum recommendations of the committee of council. I have said enough to show the House that the question really is, How is the teaching staff in voluntary schools to be improved, and what are the means which we should resort to for that purpose? BUT BOARD SCHOOLS BEAR A STRAIN ALSO. But it is not the voluntary schools only that are oppressed by the great weight of their duties. There are necessitous board schools as well. This was foreseen at the time when the act of 1870 was passed. There is a section of that aet-section 97— |