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existence; for long years it was in total abeyance; and eventually it was but grudgingly restored. But the second, the freedom from being taught, lifted unabashed its ignorant head right down the centuries until 1876, when for the first time education became compulsory. This duty was not, how. ever, allowed long to weigh upon the light-hearted British parent, for, after twenty-five years, in 1901, education was made free, contrary to the opinion of the Prime Minister of the day, but in obedience to the advice of the party wire-puller, and in order to catch the agricultural laborer's vote at an impending General Election. The vote was not caught, but the children's pence remained abolished.

Had it not been for the enormous growth of the population, education would probably to this day have remained a matter of charity, or an affair of religion, and in no way have become a national obligation to be paid for out of the pockets of the tax and rate payer.

abetted by a baser motive that fear which has dwelt in the hearts of all Western rulers of men since the French Revolution. Our population was too big to be neglected any longer. Men's minds were moved by pity and by dread. Some loved the poor, others were beginning to be afraid of them. By the end of the eighteenth century the education of the people had become a problem.

It would be brutal to retell the weary tale of Bell and Lancaster, and of the monitorial system which was not even original, and half survives in our poor little pupil teachers. A word must, however, be allowed me of the British or Undenominational Schools, and the National or Church of England Schools. Both Societies were founded by religiously minded men— the British Schools taught elementary secular learning, and did their best to teach their pupils to fear God by keeping His Commandments as made known in the Bible; the National Schools taught the same profane things, and strove their hardest, to use their own words, "to educate the children of the poor in the principles of the Church of England." In the estimable writings of Miss Hannah More you can breathe afresh the atmosphere that created the National School, whilst in the not less estimable Diaries and Correspondence of the Quaker savant William Allen you can (if you will) breathe the atmosphere that created the British School. Both schools came very late in the day. As individual efforts they deserve praise; as national enterprises they were pitifully inadequate.

The eighteenth century is commonly abused, and yet it saw our Empire founded, whilst within its limit were written books which we are compelled to believe must outlive even that Empire. Mother-wit abounded on all sides. The great pioneer inventions which have altered the face of the earth, and revolutionized our trade and commerce, were made in the eighteenth century by imperfectly educated men. There were also eager students of the old learning in all classes of society. Poor scholars found their way to the Universities as sizars and servitors, and not infrequently rose to the highest places in the Church. Enthusiasms and sentimentalisms grew and flourished.

Humanitarianism, a movement second only to Christianity in power and the subtlety of its personal influence, had its rise in the eighteenth century, and was powerfully aided and

The old dames' schools still live in literature and art, but after waging an unequal war with their new rivals, they gradually died out. In not a few of them the three R's were admirably taught.

All this time the population was increasing in geometrical progression.

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The ignorance and heathendom of both the field-laborer and the factory hand were being made known to the idle classes through the agencies of novels, sermons and public meetings. Even Prime Ministers grew interested, and the Chancellors of the Exchequer, then unaccustomed to deal with hundreds of millions, partially relaxed their grip upon the public purse. Small, but ever-increasing grants for building and equipping schools were made out of the taxpayers' money to the two Societies; and every now and again some energetic bishop would secure for the Church of England a really fat contribution from public funds, to build Churches and Church schools in neglected districts.

Unhappily-but inevitably in a country like ours, in the matter of public elementary education-there was, almost from the first, rivalry between the Established Church and the Dissenting Bodies. If only there had been a State strong enough and wise enough, and sufficiently bent upon education as a great State aim, to bid both combatants "drop their swords and daggers," and to cease their brawling over the children of totally indifferent parents, until such time as secular education had been organized, endowed, and established, when their brawling might have begun again, all might have gone well. But no such State existed or exists. Educated men know a little about religious differences, and can at a pinch be persuaded that they really care about such differences; but about education apart from religious differences few either know or care. What makes the dispute all the more unreal is, that those who ought to be the chief (if not the only) disputants-the parents of the children who actually attend or ought to attend elementary schools-have never taken any part in the fray, either because they do not care, or because they are, perhaps,

wisely sceptical as to the value of that kind of religious teaching which is likely to be imparted in the secularized atmosphere of a Protestant schoolhouse; whilst the actual antagonists have never been educational experts, but rival religionists, each striving to prevent the other from getting any ecclesiastical advantage.

This most unholy war condemned generations of English boys and girls to grow up in ignorance. For long years before 1870 it was known that the school accommodation in the country, urban and rural, was insufficient to provide sitting room for half the children who ought to have been in daily attendance. Ignorance grew apace. The voluntary system had broken down. Travellers from Switzerland and Germany, those distant lands, came home with strange tales of national education and crowded

schoolrooms. Something had to be done, and at once, to purge a great nation of a national scandal. England must be educated. The cry becoming general, Churchmen and Dissenters alike cocked their ears suspiciously, and prepared for a big fight.

The fight came off in 1870, and resulted in a compromise, famous in its day, though not so lasting as the most famous of all compromises in English history-Archbishop Cranmer's. There are men still living who honestly regret the compromise of 1870. I am not one of them, for out of it sprang those Board schools, the best things that have happened to this country since the Reformation.

The Act of 1870 was frankly supplementary; its chief object being to make up the deficiency of school accommodation, by enacting that, wherever such deficiency was found to exist and to continue after notice, School Boards were to be elected which should proceed to establish a Board school or schools, to be built and maintained out

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in a particular neighborhood there was a Church of England school with sufficient room for the children of the neighborhood, there was then, in the opinion of Whitehall, no need for a Board school, and the fact, where it was a fact, that the parents of a majority of the children were Nonconformists, went for nothing. The conscience clause was supposed to be a sufficient protection. This clause provided that "any child may be withdrawn by his parent from any religious observance or instruction in religious subjects without forfeiting any the other benefits of the school." Conscience clauses are now generally recognized to be wholly futile things. No child will endure being "withdrawn," and condemned to stand aside during any period of the day's instruction. Let him off attendance altogether during this period, and he will become an object of envy; but compel him to attend, and to stand apart, and straightway he becomes an object of derision to his school-fellows, and the helpless victim of the stupid sarcasms of his teachers. I speak with experience of both lots.

When the deficiency of accommodation was admitted and not made good, the School Board came into existence, and proceeded to provide, out of what envious Churchmen then called the "bottomless purse of the ratepayer," the Board school, to which the notorious Cowper-Temple clause applied: "No religious catechism or religious formulary which is characteristic of any particular denomination shall be taught in the school."

The compromise of 1870 consisted in this. In the teeth of fierce Noncon

formist opposition, the denominational schools, already in receipt of Government grants of public money, were allowed to become "public elementary schools within the meaning of the Act," and consequently were taken into account when the question of the deficiency of school accommodation was being considered. Nonconformist parents were, therefore, under the terms of this compromise, required to send their children to Church schools wherever it was unnecessary to establish Board schools, and to be satisfied with the protection of the conscience clause. But, as against this, the Nonconformists succeeded in keeping out of the rate-maintained schools all catechisms and denominational formularies.

On these terms England was allowed to be educated.

It was a fierce fight whilst it lasted, and its history, if recalled, will serve to measure the crushing character of the defeat which the Church of England was able to inflict upon Nonconformity last year. Dr. Dale, of Birmingham, and all stalwart Dissenters throughout the country, thought it a grievous thing that they should have been compelled to recognize sectarian schools, managed by sectarian managers, as part and parcel of a national system of education, so that the children of Nonconformist parents should in thousands of places be required to attend them. It was of course pointed out, that these schols belonged, both land and buildings, to the particular denomination that provided them, and that all the expense of keeping them open, over and above the Parliamentary grants earned by efficiency, and the children's pence (whilst that source of income existed), was made good by voluntary subscriptions. (Hence the the inapt phrase, "voluntary schools.") But Dr. Dale and his friends refused to be comforted. Could that distin

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guished and pious man have been told in a vision of the night that his political ally Mr. Chamberlain would live to be a leading member of a Cabinet which would not only abolish the Birmingham School Board, but dump down all the voluntary schools upon the rates without altering their constitution, it is better only guessing the nature of his reflections.

One has only to take up and read Mr. Morley's fiery tractate, National Education (1873), to perceive, what apparently the Prime Minister and the bishops cannot do, that the Act of 1902 is the biggest slap in the face Dissent has received since the Restoration. The Act of 1870 was supposed to be the worst that could happen to Nonconformity! Little did Dissenters realize the force of the Tractarian movement at which they were then content to poke ministerial fun. Little did they dream of the success that awaited the "Counter-Reformation." The scales have now been torn from their eyes. Looking back, it is easy to see how it happened.

Some enthusiasts, simple folk who cared about education, imagined that the Board schools would devour the Church schools. Board schools, so the argument ran, mean good buildings, ample playgrounds, proper class-rooms, all well equipped, competent and wellpaid teachers glad to be quit of clerical espionage and the patronage of the parson's lady. Board schools meant all this, true enough-but they also meant school rates. Nobody likes rates, though even Lord Goschen does not know who pays them. Landlords, farmers, railway directors, shopkeepers, private residents, all hate rates just as much as if they all paid them. How much better to be generous, and subscribe two or even three guineas a year to the Voluntary school where the children are taught to be respectful to their betters, than to be obliged to pay

ten guineas a year for a nasty Board school.

Nor will it now be denied that Whitehall favored the Voluntary schools. It was almost impossible to get a Church of England inspector to condemn a Church of England school. Many a dirty, overcrowded, ill-equipped, insanitary building, was allowed to preserve its status as "a public elementary school within the meaning of the Act."

In addition to these considerations, it must always be admitted that, for the most part, the actual flesh-andblood parents of the little Toms and Janes who attended school with greater or less regularity, were blankly indifferent whether their offspring went to a Board school or to a Voluntary school; and as for Tom and Jane, a school treat could always buy their innocent little votes.

But although the Voluntary schools were able, with these influences and backing behind them, to hold their own, they did so with great and increasing difficulty. They had to face a very real competition in the large towns. This competition was called by the good Churchman "the intolerable strain"; and the more he thought about it the more unfair did it seem to be. He had to pay for the Board school, when there was one, as a ratepayer, and at the same time to help to keep up the Voluntary school, as a Churchman. It was, so he declared, quite monstrous. He forgot that this was the compromise, under cover of which "his" school was allowed to become "a public elementary school within the meaning of the Act," and to be counted when the question of proper school accommodation was under consideration at Whitehall.

But the Church has powerful friends,

and year by year greater demands

were made upon the taxpayer; until at last, so successful were these raids upon the public purse, four-fifths at

least of the entire cost of teaching the children in the Voluntary schools came from Parliamentary grants.

What, it may well be asked, was Nonconformity about all these years? Why was this policy of "Nibble" allowed to proceed unchecked?

On this, two things may be said. First, Nonconformists are rarely in office, and it is never easy for men not in office successfully to resist a policy of "Nibble," pursued by an Established Church to which most influential persons and all "personages" belong. To resist such a constant pressure demands "eternal vigilance." Second, the split of 1886 took the fight out of Nonconformity for many a year. Home Rule for Ireland divided Dissent, as it did all other groups, into two hostile camps. Mr. Gladstone was grievously misinformed when told that the Nonconformists were all on his side. Too many people who have left off "Nonconforming" think they are still entitled to speak for Nonconformity, nor is it possible to gauge the spirit of a population scattered up and down the whole country by occasionally inviting half-a-dozen London ministers to breakfast, to admire your surroundings and listen to your table-talk. The dangers of Home Rule, real or imaginary, drove all other dangers out of thousands of Dissenting heads, and bit by bit the policy of "Nibble" made such a hole in the principle of "paying for your own religion," that it is not to be wondered at that the policy of “Grab” at last presented itself to the clerical party as quite feasible. The late Archbishop of Canterbury frankly admitted that he was amazed at the "progress" made in this direction. What is the difference, it was not impertinently asked, between ratepayers' money and taxpayers' money? If we can take the one and yet remain in control of our schools, why should we not take the other? The compromise of 1870 was

forgotten. The struggle which at last resulted in the recognition of the Voluntary schools as public elementary schools on certain terms became "ancient history," and Churchmen went about in entire good faith protesting that it was a gross injustice that one public elementary school should be on the rates, whilst another had to raise from volunteers a small sum every year to keep itself going. If reminded that this state of things resulted from a compromise by the terms of which in thousands of country places the children of Nonconformists are compelled to go to Church schools, either to receive instruction in "Church principles" or to be "withdrawn" from religious instruction altogether, the only answer usually forthcoming was, that this was an injustice, most regrettable, but apparently incurable.

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Notwithstanding the enormous growth of Church power of late years, nothing but the Boer War and the shameless election of 1900 could have made the Act of 1902 possible. However, there it is, on the Statute-book; there also is its companion, the London Act of 1903. What is to be done with them? "Leave them alone," say the bish"They do nobody any real harm. The opposition to them is but Dissenting sound and fury, signifying nothing. Our admirable magistrates are dealing with charming brusquerie with silly Passive Resisters, and our learned judges will know how to deal with recalcitrant county councils. After all, though Dissent is tolerated, we are the National Church, and the ratepayers ought to be, and probably are, greatly obliged to us, for allowing our schools, worth millions of money, to be used for the secular education of countless young schismatics, whose parents are guilty of the sin from which we pray to be delivered every day. Are the ratepayers prepared to buy us out? They will find our figure a high one."

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