I. Is the Education Act of 1870 a Just Law?

To propose the repeal of the Education Act of 1870 would be like proposing the repeal of the Gregorian Calendar. We cannot go back twelve days behind the rest of the world.

The Act of 1870 was necessary. The population had outgrown all existing means of education. The children uneducated counted by hundreds of thousands, perhaps by millions. The standard of education was on a low level. England was behind both Germany and France in the diffusion of intellectual culture, at least among the lower and middle classes of the people.

The principles embodied in the Act of 1870 cannot be rescinded; they ought rather to be carried out to their full and complete application.

The principles and intentions may be stated as follows:

1. That education, whether by voluntary schools or by rate schools, shall be universal, and co-extensive with the needs of the whole population.

2. That an education rate shall be levied in all places where the existing schools are not sufficient for the population in number or in efficiency, and that such rate shall be administered by a board elected by the ratepayers.

3. That the standard of education shall be raised to meet the needs and gradations of the people.

4. That all schools receiving aid, whether by Government grant or by rate, shall be brought under the provisions of the statute law.

5. That all such schools shall be under inspection of Government, and bound by all minutes and codes of the Committee of Privy Council as sanctioned by Parliament.

6. Lastly, it has been since that date enacted that education shall, under certain conditions and for certain classes, be compulsory.

Now, these principles have been so long admitted, and have worked themselves so deeply into public opinion and daily practice, that no scheme or proposition at variance with them would be listened to.

The condition thus made for us being irreversible, our duty is to work upon it and to work onward from it for the future.

Assuming, then, that the principles of the Act of 1870 are good and their results beneficial, the pro moters of that Act cannot but desire that it should be carried out to its fullest extent. If this be so, then, in the first place, let the education rate be levied upon the whole population.

Putting away all ecclesiastical questions, it cannot be denied that the State is justified in providing for the education of its people. It has a right to protect from the dangers arising from ignorance and vice, which breed crime and turbulence. It has a duty also to protect children from the neglect and sin of parents, and to guard their rights to receive an education which shall fit them for human society and for civil life.

If the civil power has these rights and duties towards the people, it has the corresponding rights and powers to levy upon the people such taxes or rates as are necessary for the due and full discharge of such duties.

But correlative to these rights of the civil power are also the rights of the people. If the Government may tax the whole people for education, the whole people have a right to share in the beneficial use of such taxation. An education rate raised from the whole people ought to be returned to the whole people in a form or in forms of education of which all may partake. If any one form of education can be found in which all the people are content to share, let it be adopted; if no one such form be possible, let there be as many varieties of form as can with reason be admitted. No one form of religious education would satisfy Catholics, Anglicans, Nonconformists, and un believers. No form whatsoever of merely secular instruction will satisfy the great majority who believe that education without religion is impossible. There fore, if no one form can be found to satisfy all, many and various forms of education ought to be equally admitted, and equally allowed to stand on the same ground before the law. This does not mean that every individual or every caprice may claim a share in the education rate; but that every association or body of men having public and distinct existence, already recognised by law, should be recognised also as a unit for the purposes of education, and, being so recognised, therefore admitted to a participation in the education rate; reserving always to the Government its full inspection, and to the ratepayers their due control and audit of accounts. But of this in detail hereafter.

Having thus cleared the ground, and made it impossible that any one should say with truth that they who oppose the way in which the Act of 1870 has been hitherto carried out oppose the Act itself, or that they are friends of darkness, or that they would hinder the education of the people, or that they ask for public money to spread their own religious belief, we may go on to see in what the present way of carrying out the Act is open to the censure of inequality and injustice.

1. First of all, the exclusive enjoyment and control of the education rate is given to one only class of schools, which represent one and only one form of opinion, and that form which is repugnant to the majority of the people of the United Kingdom— namely, that such schools should be only secular, to the exclusion of religion. The exclusion of religion excludes the vast majority of the people from those schools; and such schools, being exclusive, are truly and •mphatically sectarian. And here, lest I should seem not to know, or, knowing, to omit to say, that the Hible is read now in the majority of Board Schools, I cite the fact to prove that religion is not taught in them. All doctrinal formularies and catechisms are expressly excluded by the Act of 1870. But religion without doctrine is like mathematics without axioms, or triangles without base or sides. I heartily rejoice that the life, and words, and works, and death of the Divine Saviour of the world should be read by children. But that is not the teaching of religion, unless the true meaning and the due intrinsic worth of all these things be taught. But this would perforce be doctrinal Christianity, prohibited by law. There can be no mathematics without precise intellectual conceptions and adequate verbal expression. The undergraduate who went into the schools with a general notion of his Euclid was plucked.

2. But, secondly, the school rate presses unequally on the rich and on the poor. On the poor it is a sensible burden, on the rich it is absolutely insensible. For so great a sensible burden the poor ought to receive a sensible benefit.

3. Thirdly, the Board Schools were avowedly intended to receive the children of the poor. But the character of the Board Schools has been gradually so raised that the poor children are thrown upon the voluntary schools, and the Board Schools are largely frequented by the children of the middle class. The poor, therefore, so far, are paying for schools in which their own children are not taught, and the tradesman's children are educated on the rate paid also by the poor. The Lon don School Board has now proposed to found schools of a higher standard. I heartily go with the desire to provide such schools, but it is removing them still further from the poor and still further into the middle class.

g IS THE EDUCATION ACT

4. Fourthly, the amount of money spent by the School Boards out of the rate, and by loans upon the rate, amounts in ten years to about 13,000,OOOL There has been no doubt profuse and needless expenditure, for gold may be bought too dear, and money may bo wasted even in education, but nevertheless education is, if not the highest, at least inseparable from the highest interests and duties of a commonwealth. Education is vital to the commonweal. No amount of money really needed for the education of the millions that cannot pay for their own education ought to be thought too much, if only it be expended with due care and prudence, and if all who pay share equally in the benefit. But this is not so at the present time. It is of this inequality that we complain, and this inequality is a grave injustice.

5. Fifthly, the injustice will be seen to be still graver and more glaring if we compare the manner in which voluntary schools and Board Schools have been dealt with since the Act of 1870 became the law of the land.

There are at this time two sources from which public money flows into the work of education. The first is the Consolidated Fund, out of which since the year 1838 the Committee of Privy Council has made grants to voluntary schools. The second is the school rate created by the Act of 1870.

Now, in the grants from the Consolidated Fund both voluntary schools and Board Schools share equally. The two classes of schools can earn according to the minutes and codes fixed by the Committee of

Privy Council. Thus far the voluntary schools and the Board Schools are on equal terms; so far they stand on the same level before the law. But here ends equality, and here an inequality, which nothing can justify, begins. The voluntary schools are absolutely and altogether excluded from the school rate. The founders and managers of such schools must buy sites, erect buildings, pay teachers, bear all costs of management out of their own self-denial.

The School Boards have exclusive enjoyment and control of the school rate. With the public money they buy sites, erect buildings, pay teachers, and all costs of management, without contributing a sixpence by free gift or self-denial. On what principle can this be justified?

The voluntary self-denial of those who founded and maintained schools before 1870 had expended millions of money of which there is no accurate record. They were, till 1870, the sole educators of the people. Parliament was lagging behind. It voted a paltry 600,OOOL a year for education. Every year 1,200,000/. at least was contributed by voluntary self-denial. The voluntary schools in 1870 were about 8000 in number, and were educating 1,700,000 children. Nevertheless, there were perhaps a million of children, as we were told, without education. Who was to blame? First, every successive Government and Parliament which had neglected this great obligation and overlooked this crying need. Who next was to blame? All those who, by apathy and want of generous self-denial, had never taxed themselves, or opened heart or hand, for the education of the people. They, colic manl alia cintola, looked on while others laboured. Who alone were not to hlame? The founders and managers of voluntary schools, who in those dreary and starving days greatly denied themselves, and founded all that England had of primary education. And what has the Act of 1870 done?

It has done nothing for those who by their self-denial had created the national education of England.

And it has done everything for those who had never done anything for the country or for themselves.

It has endowed with the school rate those who had done nothing, and it has excluded those who had hitherto educated the people of England from participation in the school rate, to which they are also nevertheless compelled to pay.

Let nobody deceive himself by saying that they are not excluded: that the education of the Board Schools is open to them, and the refusal is their own. We have not forgotten the fox and the crane. The School Board has the cunning of both. It spreads an abundant feast, but in platters and bottles where we cannot touch it. The offer of the Board Schools to the people of England is: " We will teach your children if you will give up religious education." Christian parents answer: " You can lorce us to pay your rate, but you shall not rob our children of their religion." The education formed under the Act of 1870 falls entirely into the hands of those who desire to exclude religion from the education of the English people. In time past half the population was untaught, because the secularists had not zeal and self-denial enough to found voluntary secular schools; and now they have been rewarded by an Act which endows schools without religion at the joint, if not the chief, cost of those who, by energy and generous self-denial, have created the national and Christian education of England mainly at their own cost.

6. It would be difficult to find in all our recent his tory a more unequal and unjust condition. I am aware that the framers of the Act of 1870 did not intend to bring about this great inequality. The refusal to allow voluntary schools to share in the school rate was a subsequent exclusion. It might have been foreseen as certain to come, and it has now rooted itself for these ten years.

Who can doubt that in the long-run the system which rests on the inexhaustible school rate will spread more and more, and the system which rests on the self-denial of men of various conditions and classes, with all their vicissitudes of life and fortunes, will grow less and less: that is, that the " supplement," as it is called, will become the system, and the system will sink into the secondary rank of a supplement; or, in other words, that schools without religion will be the national schools of Christian England, and the remnant of Christian schools will be a tolerated survival of the tradition of English Christianity?

7. Already this inverted process has begun to work. Many schools have been handed over to the School Boards by Nonconformists, and some also by clergy of the Established Church. To hand them over saves money, trouble, and anxiety. Nothing but zeal for education or for religion will stand out against this temptation. Ill examples are quickly followed. Ill examples are on the inclined plane. To go down is easy and alluring. Good examples of effort, self-denial, and generosity tax the will, the spirit, and the perseverance of men. Some, we may hope, will keep up to the effort; many will give way. In ten years the compact strength of to-day may he broken, and the earnest resolution of the last ten years may be relaxed. 8. A further and more dangerous inequality is this. The School Hoards have power to place a Board School in any locality in which, according to their judgment, subject only to the Committee of Privy Council, sufficient means of education do not already exist. The Board School once opened, no new voluntary school can be formed. Take an illustration of this inequality. In a given place where a Board School exists, a sudden influx of people, as in the manufacturing or mining districts often happens, comes in. They may be either Church of England people, or Catholics, or religious Wesleyans. Their existing schools upon the spot are not large enough, or as yet they may have none. By the present practice the permission to found their own schools might be refused to them; and by the compulsory powers of the School Board their children might be forced into the Board Schools. In this way the " supplement " has the power of continual expansion, thereby preoccupying the face of the country and blocking out all voluntary schools. Moreover, it appears that sites for Board Schools are being bought up in diHtricts which as yet arc not built over. When they are inhabited, the Board School will be in possession against all comers.

8. When it is borne in mind that the Board Schools are without religion, and that the voluntary schools are the Christian schools of Christian England, we shall have some idea of the change which has already begun stealthily to work among us. Who can doubt of its inevitable ascendency in virtue of exclusive privileges and an inexhaustible command of the public money?

In order to measure this danger let the following statistics be well weighed. The voluntary schools from 1838 to 1870 had provided school room for about 1,800,000 children. Between 1870 and 1880 they had added 1,800,000 more, making in all about 3,600,000. The School Board in the ten years since 1870 have expended nearly 13, 000, OOOL, and have provided school room for 1,000,000 children. The resources of the voluntary schools are limited. Government does not grant a shilling for new sites or new buildings. The Board Schools have the inexhaustible school rate to draw from year after year for these purposes.

If every ten years shows an expenditure of so many millions, what is to check the universality of Board Schools? The voluntary system rests on free will alone: the School Boards are armed with compulsory taxation and compulsory education.

I may be asked, then, What would you propose? I will answer in two sentences:

1. Let a school rate or tax' be levied over the whole population as a part of the general taxation of the country.

2. Let all schools, with or without religious teaching, partake in the school rate, as they partake now of the grants of the Consolidated Fund, under all the con ditions of the statute law and of the minutes and codes of the Committee of Privy Council.

These two propositions change nothing in the Act of 1870; for extension is not change, hut rather completion and fulfilment.

To this proposal the following objections have been made:

1. That it would be granting public money for religious touching. This is plainly and patently contrary to fact. The Government has reduced voluntary schools to the condition of secular schools. No religion can be taught in the school hours; no religious books can be used. In what, then, do they differ from Board Schools? The Board Schools teach no religion, and draw from both sources of public aid. Let the voluntary schools in like manner draw equally from both for the secular instruction only. The Government grants no money for our religious teaching; it does not pay a sixpence for it. The Government buys of us our secular instruction at half-price. It buys the same of the Board Schools at double the price. Schools, on an average, earn one-third, or, say, one-half of their cost. "Will anybody venture to say that the religious teaching of our schools costs the other half? For instance, a school costing 300J. a jaw, we will say, earns 100/. Do the other 200Z. go for religious teaching? The religious teaching costs notliiny. It is freely given by our clergy, or by our teachers out of the school time. The maintenance of our schools would cost precisely as much if no religion were taught in them. The teacher's salary could not be less if he taught no religion. Therefore at this time the voluntary schools have three burdens on them: (1) they support themselves; (2) they have ta pay school rate; (3) they have to sell their teaching to the Government at half-price. All this is so obviously and glaringly unjust that it seems as if the exclusion of the voluntary schools from the school rate were simply in odium Christi. It is contrary to fact and truth to say that the public money would go to the teaching of religion. If the schools were as purely and exclusively secular as the Board Schools, they would cost to a fraction as much as they do at this moment. If their whole cost were paid out of the school rate, not a fraction would go to the religious teaching. But the founders and managers and teachers believe and maintain that the education of a Christian people must be Christian; and for this heterodoxy they are mulcted by exclusion from the school rate.

2. But, again, it will be said: The voluntary schools choose their own teachers. And perhaps the Board Schools do not choose their own teachers? Surely this is a wanton objection. Is it an honest one? If the secular teaching of voluntary schools be equal to the secular teaching of Board Schools — and from the Government Reports we know that within decimal points it is so — why should not the selection of the teacher be with the founders and managers of the voluntary schools? The Government avowedly looks only to the secular teaching, and treats our schools as secular schools. The objectors parade their schools as exclusively secular; so far as the law takes cognisance, our schools are equally secular. Moreover, we show oqual efficiency in secular teaching, and yet the Government gives to the Board Schools, out of grants and rates, not double only, but an enormous excess over the pittance we earn by equal efficiency. This is really mulcting the voluntary schools, because with equal secular efficiency they also, at other times, and by other means, teach Christianity. In what does the selection of the teacher affect the claim of the school to fair and equal treatment, if its secular results are what they ought to be?

I have said that the efficiency of the voluntary and the Board Schools is equal. From the last Government Report I find the proportion of passes in the voluntary and the Board Schools as follows:

Voluntary. Board.

Reading... H8-HO 8W31

Writing... 7i)'79 H3'16

Arithmetic... 74-17 79-33

And this is the competition of schools starved by exclusion from the school rate against schools surfeited with public money. The average stipend of teachers in the voluntary schools would not be 150/.; in the Board Schools it is not less than 2501. a year.

8. But further, it has been said: If a share in the rate be given, the ratepayers must have control. Why not? At this time Government gives aid, and has control over the whole secular teaching of our schools.

It has control also over the financial, material, and sanitary management of the school by a vigilant and close inspection. The school rate, in like manner, would go only for secular teaching. Let the ratepayers share with Government in the inspection of these things. At this time the industrial and reformatory schools founded by voluntary effort, and aided by grants and by rates, are visited by the Government inspectors and by those of the School Boards. At this time the diocesan schools, founded and supported by voluntary efforts, in which are children transferred from the district schools of the Poor Law, are visited closely and vigilantly, not only by the inspectors of the Local Government Board, but by all the boards of guardians in the metropolitan district. They pay out of the rates for the maintenance of their children, and they come at all times with or without notice, and investigate everything, writing their commendation, or blame, or requirements in a book. If voluntary schools were aided out of rates, the due application of such rates would be, in like manner, open to the inspection of the ratepayers.

4. Lastly, it is said that this would be concurrent endowment. I answer, if it be endowment, then the Board Schools are already endowed; and if they be endowed, then a glaring injustice has been done. The State has endowed the education of those who had done nothing to educate the people of this country; and it has endowed exclusively a kind of school which the majority of the people cannot enter. If it be endowment, then the ill example has been set by those who

VOL. m. c cry out against endowments and would disendow the Established Church. They would disendow its schools while they are endowing their own. I do not deny that there is some look of truth in this talk of endowment. Hut I have shown, that as the enjoyment of grants and rates is exclusively for secular instruction in Board Schools, so it would he strictly and exclusively in the voluntary schools, no religious teaching being paid for, or even estimated in the costs of such schools. In answering these objections, I have not been able to clear my mind of the thought that those who make them are impelled rather by unwillingness to admit others to the rate, than by the force of reason. Is it that they fear that the energy, and zeal, and self-denial of the volun taries, if they only had fair play and equal aid from the public revenues in grants and rates, would outstrip the Board Schools in multiplication and efficiency? I am firmly persuaded that this would be the case. And I must affirm that the voluntary system is a moral power which no public money could create. It is zeal against hire. It is the uubought energy of those who gladly spend, and are spent, for the commonweal. It is free service and free gift against paid service and public money. This noble and national force of beneficence GoTernmonts can paralyse, and starve, and destroy; but they cannot create or rekindle if they should insanely destroy it.

A great American has said that the Americans are "the most common-schooled, but the least truly educated of people." May it never be said that the English are the most " board-schooled of people;" for certainly we should then be the most heartlessly educated and the least Christian of people.

I will now very briefly enumerate the reasons why I believe such an extension of the Act of 1870 ought to be made.

1. First, because the people of this country, so far as they have yet been able, have pronounced decisively against merely secular instruction. In all School Boards, with the exception of a few, it has been resolved that the Bible shall be read and explained in their schools. This covers about 12,000,000 of the population, and the schools in that area have 800,000 children. Add to this the whole mass of the voluntary schools— Anglican, Catholic, Wesleyan — by which religion and doctrinal Christianity are sedulously taught, containing at least 2,000,000 children, and it may be said that the whole people of the country have declared themselves for religious schools.

2. I say so far as they have as yet been able to speak; for the Parliament of 1870 was not elected on an Education cry, but on a cry for the disestablishment of the Irish Church. The Liberation Society and its political allies went in with enthusiasm against the first wing of the Tudor House, which then was tottering, in the hope of shaking also the other wing in due time, and then ruining the body. It was, therefore, a Parliament ready for schemes of secular education. Omne majus continet minus. The disendowment of religion contains the endowment of secularism, as the greater includes the less. But for this political crisis it may be doubted whether the Bill of 1870, as it stands, would have ever become law. If at the next general election the constituencies were fairly asked, Will you have secular or Christian education? I believe, and, until the contrary is proved, I shall continue to believe, that a vast majority would declare for Christian schools. For the reasons here too briefly and hastily given I must affirm, that the working of the Act of 1870 has resulted in grave injustice to those who had been labouring to create the great system of Christian and national schools, while the advocates of secular education were doing, and had done, nothing for the instruction of the people. It excludes them from the benefit of the school rate; it lays on them the double burden of paying to support a system of schools which they in conscience cannot frequent, and also further of maintaining schools of their own; it results in a growing danger to the Christian education of England. Until 1870 the tradition of Christian education in England, however thwarted and obstructed, had never been broken. For the first time it was broken then. A generation is growing up, formed in secular schools, in which, if the brain is stimulated, the heart, the conscience, the will, and therefore the character, cannot be formed. England is a Christian people, and its national character is Christian, because it has hitherto been formed and perpetuated by Christian schools. How can this English and Christian character be perpetuated or formed when the schools have ceased to be Christian? If any one shall MJ it will still be formed in the homes of the people, gnch an answer is either from ignorance of what the homes of our millions really are, or from a levity of mind. It is, then, the Christianity of England and the national character of Englishmen that are at stake. These things are too vital to be tampered with by poli ticians, and pedants, and parties. If, with the state of Prance before us, we will not look before, and either retrace our steps, or avert by timely wisdom the dangers we have created in these last years, then assuredly we shall incur, as we shall well deserve, the same political and social decline which has paralysed the character.and dissolved the unity of that great people.

From the year 1838 to this day, the subject of education has been treated piecemeal, in the vicissitudes of political strifes, by alternate Governments and by contending parties. It demands a wiser and a nobler treatment. The whole subject needs to be re viewed by an impartial tribunal, raised above the din and darkness of political conflicts.

The desire and will of the people at large ought to be known. I believe that at this time it is not adequately and truly known. There is widespread discontent in the homes of the people. We are told that the Board School system represents the mind of the people. We believe that it represents only a minority. The Board School system is instruction without religion. The whole people of Ireland would reject it. The great majority of Scotland would reject it. The great majority of the people of England are claimed by the Established Church. They would reject it. Of the Catholics of England and Scotland I need not speak. A multitude of Nonconformists, true to the religious spirit of their forefathers, would reject it.

Who would remain '? An active minority which, in a moment of political excitement, carried the Act of 1870. We believe the great majority of the United Kingdom to desire religious and Christian schools. Why are they who say we are wrong in this belief so slow to let it be tested? I must believe that they are not so sure as they say. Let them, then, unite with us in putting it to the test. Let us unite in humbly praying that Her Majesty be graciously pleased to issue a Royal Commission to review the whole course of legislation in respect to education, with all the acts of the Committee of Privy Council since 1838. The evidence to be taken would be that of men of every kind and class, whose life has been spent in acquiring personal experience and a mature judgment in the education of the people. They who desire that the Board School system should cover the face of the land will deprecate a Royal Commission. They who fear so great a disaster to our Christianity and character as Englishmen will earnestly pray for it. They will urge it all the more earnestly, because they believe that there is danger in delay; that every year will spread more widely schools without religion, and starve out the Christian schools of England. It is now or never. The ten years since 1870 have taught us our danger. The next ten years will render impossible what can be done now. In 1882 the Christian schools of England may be placed upon the broad and common foundation of equality before the law. In 1892, if we are slack to-day, the time may bo past for ever.

II.

THE WOKKING OF THE EDUCATION ACT OF 1870 UNEQUAL: THEKEFOKE UNJUST.

(Nineteenth Century, February 1883.)