We were determined to oppose what you called the vital principles of your bill, because we saw in it, as explained by members of your own cabinet, a deliberate intention to wreck the school boards of England; because we have been told in violent terms by the prime minister and his bishops, and in violent terms by the right honorable gentleman, that they hoped and expected that the result of the bill would be that school boards would disappear.

You thought that the school boards were unpopular with the nation and that you could trample upon them. That was the spirit of the conferences at the foreign office. That was the language which was held throughout the winter; and it was upon that miscalculation that the bill was founded. You have discovered your mistake. You have discovered that not alone on this side of the House but upon your own side of the House your attempts on the life of the school boards of the country have met with repugnance and with opposition. Now, those, in my opinion, are the main grounds which have destroyed this bill. We have nothing to regret in the part we have taken in making clear to the country and the House what has been the true object and what has been the true character of this bill. This bill has education authority. Of course, if 1896 census returns should be used (as we presume will be the case, seeing that the bill is now apparently to be hung up till next year), the list will have to be considerably augmented. We have, in a few cases only, included school districts, and these only because in some cases some of the constituent boroughs probably contain over 20,000 inhabitants.

“Municipal boroughs of over 20,000 which possess school boards.

"Ashton-under-Lyne, Bacup, Barnsley, Batley, Brighouse, Burslem, Burton-onTrent, Carlisle, Chesterfield, Colchester, Darlington, Darwen, Dewsbury, Folkestone, Gravesend, Hartlepool, Jarrow, Keighley, Kidderminster, Lancaster, Longton, Lowestoft, Luton, Macclesfield, Maidstone, Morley (Staffs), Nelson, Rawtenstall, Rochester, Rotherham, Royal Leamington Spa, Scarborough, Shrewsbury, Stafford, Stalybridge, Stockton-on-Tees, Stoke-on-Trent, Tynemouth, Wakefield, Wednesbury, West Hartlepool, Widnes (Lancs), Workington.

"But besides the above 43 municipal boroughs there are 7 whose population in 1891 was very nearly 20,000, and which by this time will be able to claim to come under this clause of the bill and form their own education authorities; and no doubt this number will have to be considerably augmented when the 1896 census is considered as the basis of calculation. Sir J. Gorst, on Thursday week, in reply to Mr. J. Samuel, said that between the present time and the report stage he would consider the question whether boroughs under 20,000 on subsequently reaching that figure would automatically become independent educational authorities.

"Municipal boroughs of nearly 20,000 which possess school boards.

"Barnstaple, Ilkeston, Loughborough, Margate, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Pembroke, Salisbury.

"We have in the next place compiled a list which shows that there are 32 municipal boroughs of over 20,000 inhabitants which, though not possessing school boards, have attendance committees. These boroughs would under the amendment which we are considering have to form education authorities under the act.

"Municipal boroughs of over 20,000 with no school boards, but with attendance committees. "Accrington, Bedford, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Bury, Cambridge, Chatham, Cheltenham, Chester, Chorley, Crewe, Doncaster, Dover, Eastbourne, Eccles, Glossop, Hereford, Heywood, Hyde, Kingston-on-Thames, Middleton, Peterborough, Preston, Ramsgate, Reigate, Richmond, St. Helens, Southport, Stockport, Torquay, Tunbridge Wells, Warmington.

"In addition to the above, there are 14 boroughs without school boards, but with attendance committees, in which the population according to the 1891 census was

failed because it was introduced without due consideration of the operation of the change which you proposed to effect. It has failed because even your own party was not united upon it. It has failed because it has been conducted under a mandate from the House of Lords. It has been conducted under the instructions of those who knew nothing of the real feeling of the nation and who knew nothing of the real sentiments of its representatives. That is one of the main causes of the failure of this bill. It has failed because it was conceived in the interests of a party and for the promotion of the objects of a sect. If you will abandon these sources of weakness in the coming year; if you will come forward with a measure for the education of the people which is framed not in the interests of a party, not to fulfill the objects of a sect, then you will find from us no obstructive opposition. We have declared, and we are willing to show, that in any fair bill, not conceived in the spirit I have described, elementary education may be made a nonparty measure. If it is brought forward not with the object of destroying the school boards of England, but of assisting upon fair terms those schools which might be assisted-if it is a fair bill for the promotion of the education of the people-then it will be a bill less than 20,000. Some of them must by this time far exceed 20,000 in population, as the 1896 census will doubtless show.

“Municipal boroughs of nearly 20,000 with no school boards, but with attendance committees.

"Banbury, Berwick-on-Tweed, Bury St. Edmunds, Grantham, Haslingden (Lancs.), Kings Lynn, Mansfield, Mossley (Lancs.), Poole, Taunton, Weymouth, Winchester, Worthing, Whitehaven.

"With regard to urban districts, Mr. Balfour last Thursday week, in reply to some remarks by Mr. Asquith, said that with regard to the question as to whether urban districts of over 20,000 inhabitants should have the power of forming their own education authorities, he would like to consider the question and give his decision at a later stage of the bill. This question was, however, reached on Monday night on an amendment by Mr. S. Evans to the effect that 'the education authority which under clause 1 was to be given to boroughs of 20,000 inhabitants should be extended to urban districts.' This was defeated by 265 to 143.

"The result, then, of the acceptance of Sir A. K. Rollit's amendment will be that to the 126 counties and county boroughs which have under the bill to form education authorities must be added 43 municipal boroughs with school boards and 32 municipal boroughs with attendance committees. To these will most likely have to be put 7 and 15 other municipal boroughs as soon as they reach 20,000 (and many of them have probably done that by this time); so that the number goes up almost at once from 126 to 222.

"This means an enormous increase in costly and duplicated machinery, possibly in new inspectors, in new codes of instruction, and certainly in elaborate official staffing and establishment charges."

The growth of urban populations in England must be taken into account in any consideration of the political influence of towns. The total urban population in 1891 was 20,802,770, or 71.7 per cent of the entire population. The ratio of increase in urban population in the decade 1881-1891 was 15.3 per cent, as against an increase of 3.4 per cent for the rural population. From an analysis of the detailed statistics it appears that 22 per cent of the population of England and Wales live in 6 towns of upward of 250,000 inhabitants; 31.6 per cent (in 1881 29.6 per cent) in 24 (in 1881, 20) towns of over 100,000 inhabitants; 40.6 per cent in 62 towns of over 50,000 inhabitants, 53.2 per cent in 182 towns of over 20,000 inhabitants, and 17,826,347, or 61.5 per cent, in 358 towns of over 10,000 inhabitants. In 1881 14,626,131, or 56.3 per cent, of the whole population, lived in 303 towns of over 10,000 inhabitants. (Statesmen's Yearbook, 1896.)

which will not disappear as this bill has disappeared under the force of public discussion, but will be a bill which may make a permanent settlement of the greatest aim to which the House of Commons can direct its attention- namely, the education of the people. [Schoolmaster, June 27, 1896, pages 1163-1165.]

Outside of Parliament the discussion of the measure was vigorously maintained. Among many articles in the leading English periodicals none carried greater weight than that from the pen of Sir Lyulph Stanley, one of the notable leaders of the public-school movement, and long identified with the progressive party of the London school board. His review of the bill is here reproduced, with slight omissions:

The proposals now before the country in the education bill of the Government do not err in the direction of moderation. Not content with propounding a scheme for the organization on a public basis of secondary education, the Government invites us to revolutionize our elementary system and to reverse the whole policy of the act of 1870. Hitherto we have been accustomed to suppose that when important institutions had been established, and had built up round them an elaborate and working system, changes proposed would only affect details, and that conservatism in this country would respect past legislation and not assume the reactionary aspect of the continental counter revolution. It is unfortunate that the present Government, although it is supposed to represent the alliance of moderate Liberalism with Conservative defense of the constitution, has utterly disregarded more prudent counsels, and has propounded a scheme which may be satisfactory to those clerical forces which can not bear to see popular education slipping out of their grasp, and which will also please those who resent the expansion of popular instruction, and who would far rather see public money spent on military preparations and relief to landowners than in the improved education of the people.

It may be difficult to explain how the present bill will work if it should become law. But there can be no doubt that it will severely hamper the growth of public education and place its development under the control of the absolutely noneducational forces of local self-government. It establishes differential taxation in favor of private sectarian management, and discourages local effort by withholding public aid where local contribution is largest. It subsidizes voluntary schools out of the rates without giving the ratepayers a voice in their management, and, under the pretense of doing away with a too minute system of public aid, it does much to supersede all central direction and organization, which for years to come must be one of the guaranties of progress.

So far as it introduces a local controlling financial power, that power is to be used not for the purpose of compelling remote and ignorant local bodies to improve their teaching, but for the purpose of hampering progressive local bodies.

It exposes the body which is to direct secondary education to all the drawbacks that must result from associating it with the controversies and feuds which characterize the politics pertaining to elementary schools, and it fails to evolve any order from the present chaos by omitting to organize throughout the country local authorities of suitable area which shall at once be invested with the necessary power to do in all cases what can now be done by school boards where they exist.

While recognizing the unsatisfactory character of the parochial school board area, it does not in reality supersede it, but, so far as it provides a new area, rushes into the opposite extreme and gives us an authority which while suitable as to area for secondary education, is far too large for the purposes of elementary education. In short, it is a bill so bad in its principles and essential details that no recognition of it should be admitted, and its faults do not admit of being corrected in committee after conceding a second reading.

Let us first examine the bill as it bears upon elementary education.

It creates a new authority, the county council. This county council becomes, outside of municipal boroughs, through its education committee, the school board of the future, wherever school boards do not now exist. In municipal boroughs, other than county boroughs, the town council will in future become the school board. But existing school boards will lead a precarious life. They will apparently pass rapidly through a transition such as Madagascar has experienced, passing through dependence under a protectorate to extinction and absorption in the direct domain of the new authority.

The county council is to act through a committee. But apparently, except in the case of Wales and London, the county council has a free hand; it may or may not appoint outsiders, but probably the education committee must be a portion and not the whole of the county council.

Thus we pass at once from a body elected for educational purposes to a body elected for noneducational purposes. Everyone knows that municipal contests, and still more elections to rural county councils, do not turn at all on educational questions, and it is very unlikely that the addition of educational functions to the existing duties of a county council will materially modify the considerations which will lead candidates to present themselves as electors to vote. If the election of school boards required modification by the abolition of the cumulative vote, the periodic replacement of the members and the enlargement of the area, these changes could have been brought about without the abolition of school boards in principle, which is really the purpose and effect of this bill.

Again, the area for elementary school government should certainly not be so large as the county. The parish is undoubtedly too small, though the commune is the usual unit on the Continent, where public education has been organized long before England. Still it must be admitted that the parochial area, both for administration and for the incidence of taxation, is on many grounds insufficient for producing the best educational results. The area, however, of the district council would have been sufficient, and would have enabled us to secure (1) a sufficient number of competent representatives; (2) an area not too large for the members of the board to have some personal knowledge of the whole of their district; (3) a sufficient number of schools to educate the board by a comparison of their respective efficiency-and this is a most important consideration; (4) an area of taxation which would correct the undue pressure in any particular part, and would enable the board to deal fairly with the needs of the whole of the district.

The present bill, however, proposes an organization which can only be described as ludicrous. The county council, say of Devonshire or Norfolk, becomes, through its education committee, the potential school board for Devonshire or Norfolk. If hereafter any new parochial school board is needed, the county council committee will almost inevitably become the school board; it may also, and probably will, take over the functions of many existing school boards, and becomes the school attendance committee for all parts of the county not included in municipal boroughs or school board areas. Nevertheless, the charge of enforcing school attendance is not to be defrayed by a general charge over the portions of the county under the administration of the county committee, but is apparently to be met by special rates levied in the respective poor-law unions or portions of poor-law unions.

So, too, the school board rate levied by the new county authority will be separate for each parochial school board area, and separate accounts will have to be kept, and the county authority will have to sit for a quarter of an hour as the school board for Black Acre, then as the school board for White Acre, for Bishop's Stoke, for King's Stoke, and Earl's Stoke, and all the successive parishes it will have to administer. There is apparently power for the county authority, if it pleases, to convert these special rates into one general rate leviable in the parishes for which it acts as a school board (section 11), but prima facie the rates are to be separate.

The importance of this question of the rate is apparent when we remember another important new provision of the bill, that the county council is to restrain the spending power of the school boards. !

If the maintenance rate in a district exceeds £1 a head, where it has not already done so, the school board must get the leave of the county council to spend more. Let it be noted that, so anxious is the bill to cripple education, this supervising power is not given to the new county education authority, which will be, in time, more or less familiar with the needs of education; it is given to the county council itself, in which all the members, who care nothing for education, and who have not wished to join the education committee, will vote.

Nay, more. So anxious are the authors of the bill to keep down education that it is actually provided in the case of an urban sanitary district, not a borough, and conterminous with a parish, that whereas the education committee of the county council will be the school board for the district, the authority whose leave must be obtained before the cost of maintenance from the rates exceeds £1 a head will be the local board and not the county council. Anyone who knows the type of speculative builder and others who frequently form a local board will know what readiness they will show to consent to taxation for education. Moreover, their instincts of local patriotism will be enlisted against their new school board. Fancy a populous urban parish in Lancashire of some 20,000 inhabitants whose schools are administered by the county education committee of Lancashire. That county education committee will plan the schools, determine their site, fix the number and scale of salaries of teachers, and generally make all the rules for the administration of the schools. On that education board probably not one resident from the town in question will have a seat, and yet, subject to the £1 limit for expenditure from the rates in maintenance, this external body will have the whole government of the schools. Is this local government? Is it not rather a caricature of local government? Where is to be found the natural correlation of taxation and representation? Another hardship is that the governing body will be largely, even preponderatingly, elected by those who contribute nothing to this or any school board. In many counties of England the bulk of the rural population who elect the county council are not in school board areas. Let the area of existing school boards be extended by all means, but let the new area which furnishes the new governing body be an area sharing the burdens, and therefore equally responsible in feeling with the old restricted area.

No doubt some element of local management is preserved by clause 10, which enacts that in a rural parish half the managers shall be nominated by the parish council and half by the county education authority. But this clause itself is full of absurdities. It says that the county council shall delegate their powers of control and management; but who shall say how much this means? Does it mean the appointment and dismissal of teachers? This seems hardly consistent with the act of 1873. Moreover, section 15 of the act of 1870 is incorporated, which gives the school board power to dismiss the managers. Is one body to appoint and another to dismiss? At any rate, management can not include settling the salaries and numbers of the staff or any general rules as to qualifications which the county school board may draw up. The clause would open the door to endless opportunities of friction and conflict. Again, in a county borough the education committee is to nominate the managers; but in any other borough, while an education committee must be appointed to act for the borough council, yet the borough council and not the education committee is to nominate the managers, and in an urban district which is also a school district the local board will nominate the managers. Can anyone fancy the confusion and conflicts that would arise from such a state of things?

The fact is that the moment you give local administration to a body not chosen by those whose money they are to spend you introduce a principle absolutely opposed to the history and principles of our local self-government; and all this is done to propitiate clerical opposition and to call into existence a new body which will supersede the hated school board.