sympathize with the law, lawlessness is offensive. When you hate the law, you cannot hate the law-breaker.

The bishops are amazed that leading Liberals do not denounce the Passive Resisters, but will their lordships swear to

observe reciprocity, and to reprimand any Churchman or woman who may hereafter decline to pay a school rate, levied under an Act of Parliament which applies a "CowperTemple" clause to all the public elementary schools? I doubt whether the bishops would promise to do more than pay their own rates, and it may be that some of them would refuse even to do that. There were once seven bishops sent to the Tower for disobeying the Lord's Anointed, to whom they owed the religious duty of "passive obedience." How did they excuse themselves? By the argument that, whilst they were bound by their faith never actively to resist the King, they were not bound to do everything he commanded, if they thought it wrong. Modern Nonconformists are not usually well read in non-juring literature; but if they were, they would find in the writings of the excellent Kettlewell their case admirably expounded.

It is a most dangerous position, full of strife and discord, and the loosening of the laws. Neither Church nor Dissent is strong enough to snub the other.

There is one safe way out, and one only. By compromise between the rival parties-who, be it always remembered, are neither of them the parties really concerned. How can a compromise be effected? We are told, on high authority, that it is idle to negotiate with anybody unless you have something to offer him in exchange for what you want from him. Do ut des, quotes our Birmingham-Bismarck. It is a wise maxim, borrowed from the Canonists, and therefore appropriate to our present needs.

What has Nonconformity got to offer the Church of England? But one thing-the "Cowper-Temple" clause. It will be hard to part with. It has cost Dissent dearly enough. It is all that is left of the compromise of 1870. The Church has gobbled up everything else. Still, there it remains to truck with. There are more than a million children of Church of England parentage under the operation of this clause, and so prevented from being instructed in "Church principles” in their day schools. It cannot be denied that a million children are worth considering. Do ut des. A few highfliers may believe that some day the "Cowper-Temple" clause may be expunged without any price being paid. But that is hardly likely. The Act of 1902 is the high-water mark of Anglican influence in our generation.

What ought, or might, the Church party be willing to give in exchange for a right of entry into the old Board school-now the "provided" school? In order to teach "Church principles" to a million of children, they will surely give something. On the other hand, how little is Nonconformity prepared to take in exchange for its beloved "Cowper-Temple" clause.

Answering the last question first, I do not think there is a chance of persuading Nonconformists to part with the clause, unless their admitted grievance as to their children being compelled to attend Church of England and Roman Catholic schools is completely remedied, and this can only be by all elementary schools being placed under the control of the public local authority. Were this done, the other (and admitted) grievance of the Nonconformist would disappear, viz., the inability of teachers of his way of thinking to become head-teachers in one-half of the rate-maintained schools of the country. For many a long day to come it will be a disadvantage to

be a Nonconformist, if you want to get anything; but disadvantage is one thing, disability another.

Were any such compromise as this possible, the result would be, that religion could be taught in all the public elementary schools of the country. The property question arises. It always

does. The denominational schools are private property. If they are taken over by the country, they must be paid for. If the local authority can come to terms, either to rent or buy, well and good! If it cannot, it must either buy the old schools from their proprietors at a fair valuation to be fixed by some third party, or build new schools of its own. This will cost money-there is no way out of it.

There still remains the question as to the nature of the religion to be taught in all the schools. Here the parents really must, whether they like it or not, conquer their shyness, and, making their first appearance in this ancient and horrid controversy, tell us, when they send Tom and Jane to school, whether they wish them to receive any, and if any, what, religious instruction. There is no chance of the multiplication of strange parental religions. We are not an imaginative people. Jews, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Dissenters (in a lump), will usually exhaust the list. The great body of Dissenters will be found ready to accept the same broad, simple Bibleteaching which, for the most part, characterized Board School Christian

ity.

Unorthodox Dissenters and Agnostics seldom object to their children receiving ordinary religious school teaching, since they know they can always make their own opinions known to their children in private intercourse; but any parent who feels alarm can set his fears at rest, by letting his child run home at the end of the secular work.

In schools where the great majority of the children are all of the same way of parental thinking, things will go on just as they do now in denominational schools. At the close of the secular work, a small minority may either clatter off home, or into another place to receive their religious instruction. In a very short time, we should have heard the last of the religious difficulty in schools. The extra expense occasioned by religious teaching must be paid for by voluntary effort. Would it be absurd to expect the parents to subscribe? At all events, if they did not, other people would.

Compromises are never popular. We love to get the better of our opponent. The Churchman likes to think he has got "his" school upon the rates, and the Dissenter clings to his "CowperTemple" clause. It will be hard to persuade either to compromise. ardent Dissenter "passively resists" in his hour of affliction. If the pendulum swings, the ardent Churchman I will do his bit. The honors are easy.

The

The friends of compromise must appeal to the commonsense and sobriety of the English people. Why should we not provide a good sound secular education for the children of everybody who cares or is obliged to send his children to a public elementary school, and at the close of each day's secular work, for which alone the tax and rate payer will be responsible, allow the children to receive in the schoolhouse the religious instruction their parents desire them to have? Who then can complain? There will be no room for passive resistance on either side. Whoever is opposed to such a state of things must, as it seems to me, be prepared to admit, that he looks upon our national system of secular education as a means of propagating his own religious faith among a class of children he could not otherwise hope to reach.

If no such compromise is possible, the fight must continue, with consequences to the cause of religion which The Independent Review.

some day will startle both Churchman and Dissenter.

Augustine Birrell.

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished.

Sometimes, when one reads of technical education, or sees what is being done in provincial night schools by County Council Technical Education Committees, one begins to wonder whether our technical educators have ever given a thought to technique; or whether at least they can be aware how much technique the English have long practiced without their aid.

Over all the countryside, wherever one goes, indications of technique are visible to the seeing eye. By technique is meant an exercise of skill acquired by practice and directed to a well foreseen end. It is the name for the action of any of our powers after they have been so improved by training as to perform that action with certainty and success. This is the nature of technique; and, go where one will about the country, one can hardly escape the evidences of its abundant practice.

The metalled roads tell of it well. The deep-rutted by-roads, too, and the winding lanes, preserve through years of neglect the traces of technique in their hedgerows, however tangled; in their ditches, however choked. On the old ruinous field gate, with its lightly arched, tapering top-bar rudely carved on the under side against the tenon, the grey lichen cannot hide the signs

of a vitality more marvellous than its own-the intensified vitality of those skilled hands that shaped the timbers. The fields, newly ploughed in straight furrows, or with stubble in long rows, or green lines of wheat just appearing after snow; and the meadows, well rolled and level, or perhaps still wavy from long-forgotten ploughings; and the river banks; and the copses growing up on old "stamms"; and the woods, thinned out, and full of decayed stumps of felled trees, are all witnesses to the exercise of technical powers, just as are the tools, the farm implements, the wagons and carts, the very horses, and cattle, and sheep. Each detail of country life offers its convincing proof of skill to anyone who cares to look.

But it is in the nature of a technique (as every artist well knows) to be indescribable. No one who practices it can ever explain its essential mystery to one who is not acquainted with it by similar practice. An attentive student from the outside may track it very far, but not home. If he sees the fine results, and discriminates between them and the next finest, he is still unaware, except by inference, of the subtle vitality in the workman's hands which produced the especial fineness. The expert cricketer alone can truly appreciate the inner delicacies of cricket: the admiring onlooker who is not an expert misses what is most to be admired. And since there is this cryptic element in technique, imperceptible

to the uninitiated, the work of a true craftsman often looks so easy as to persuade an outsider that there is nothing in it. How should I know whether I can play the flute or not? I have never tried. How should we guess that a peasant's work is less simple than it appears? We have not given it a thought: we have been talking about technical education.

Yet the matter is one that would reward attention, and from several points of view. Besides the immediate interest that attaches to any form of dexterity, there are bound up with the skill of country laborers secondary interests enough to make it worth investigation. To begin with, an insight into it may enrich our own pleasure. The world has had a good deal of fun out of "Hodge," and a good deal of sweet food for spiritual pride in the comparison of its own learning with his "ignorance"; but a better pleasure than the old fun may be had from recognizing the peasant's accomplished efficiency, and a sweeter gratification than that of spiritual pride from the discovery of more merit in our race than our book-learning had led us to suspect. For our own immediate profit, therefore, it is well to know a little of what it is that peasants can do. Then, too, in the fact that commerce threatens to dispense with the skill of the English peasantry (so that it may actually be not worth the notice of technical educators) there is ground for taking another kind of interest-the antiquarian kind-in that skill. The traditional, and now vanishing, techniques of the country must some of them be inconceivably old. They must have been known to the Saxon pirates (not to mention the builders of Stonehenge and the men of the long-barrows-good at spade-work), and have been practiced diligently by those gentlemen when they settled down seriously to begin making the country what it is

now.

The woodman's axe is implied in the Yule log, and the reaper's hook has its place in some of those harvest customs that fascinate the folk-lore student. And as the first English (from whom so much has come) must have been skilled country folk, so one cannot but feel at least an antiquary's regret at seeing their old and wellproved techniques at last going out of use. The vigor of the men who practiced them has been a stand-by, a kind of last national resource, for a very long time.

And this suggests a more vital interest attaching to the skill of country people. What influence the practice of technical gifts may have upon character is perhaps an open question, but farmers are everywhere asserting that the younger generation of laborers are as untrustworthy as they are unskilful. It is true that the farmer is a prejudiced witness, who finds fault as it were by tradition, and was lamenting even in Shakespeare's day "the ancient time, when service sweat for duty, not for meed," yet now it does really seem as though his accusations may have some ground in fact. Allied with this, there is that much regretted discontent with rural life which is emptying our villages and filling our towns. And though, of course, the causes of this discontent are originally and chiefly economic, yet a factor in the problem may very possibly be discovered in this: that to the villager the advantages of elementary education are not even a tolerable substitute for the old lost skill that made the days pleasant and won the approbation of all the neighbors.

That the old-fashioned men found an interest in one another's ability is beyond a doubt. One or two short fragments of conversation with laboring men, to be presently quoted, should be enough to establish that fact. As to the nicety of skill involved in the work