(1) By the Right Hon. Viscount Halifax (2) A REPLY. By J. Lawson Walton 747 THE GOSPEL OF MB. F. W. H. MYERS. By W. H. Mallock A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT. By the Countess of Warwick CORN-GROWING IN BRITISH COUNTRIES. By E. Jerome Dyer THE DUEL IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA. By R. Cl. Bachofen von THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY. By J. Keir Hardie THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN GERMANY. By O. Eltzbacher. THE CANALS OF MARS: ARE THEY REAL? By the Rev. Edmund Ledger THE MONUMENTS IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL. By Alfred Higgins THE DETERIORATION IN THE NATIONAL PHYSIQUE. By George F. Shee MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. By the Hon. Mrs. Chapman AN UNPOPULAR INDUSTRY. By Miss Catherine Webb STONEHENGE AND THE MIDSUMMER SUNRISE. By Arthur R. Hinks WESSEX WITCHES, WITCHERY, AND WITCHCRAFT. By Hermann Lea THE INCREASE OF CANCER. By Dr. Alfred Wolff. THE TAJ AND ITS DESIGNERS. By E. B. Havell THE Education Bill of 1902 has contained many surprises, but the greatest of them has been reserved for the clergy of the Church of England. With few exceptions they saw nothing in the Bill but an end to a financial burden. Their schools were to be maintained out of the rates, and if the obligation to keep the buildings in repair caused some of them a passing anxiety it was slight in comparison with the relief afforded in other directions. That the Bill would make a radical change in their own relation to their schools never occurred to them. Nor, indeed, did it occur to their opponents. A measure which embodies the greatest ecclesiastical revolution that the Church of England has seen since the Reformation is still regarded by Nonconformists as a formal confirmation of the clergy in all their traditional privileges. A measure which makes the vicar of each parish in which there is a Church school the removable deputy of VOL. LIII-No. 311 B a lay committee is still commonly described as a fresh riveting of sacerdotal chains. The clergy may be pardoned for not being wise before the fact when as yet their adversaries have not become wise after it. The explanation of this inability to realise what the Bill would do must be sought in a remote past. Before the Act of 1870 the elementary education of the country was practically in the hands of the clergy. They had taken it up when there was no one else to do it. For a generation indeed the State had contributed largely to the support and to a less extent to the building of voluntary schools. But the initiative in the vast majority of cases had lain with the clergy. As the Government grants were increased to meet new and larger conceptions of the meaning of education the burdens thrown on the clergy grew in at least an equal degree. Nominally, indeed, they were borne by the body of subscribers to the schools. But these subscribers had to be obtained by the importunity, stimulated by the example, and not infrequently replaced by the self-sacrifice of the clergy. It was only natural, therefore, that in the clerical scheme of the universe the parish school should hold a place only second to that of the parish church. Indeed, as the parish school had often to be kept going out of the vicar's own pocket, while the parish church kept itself, there was some excuse for his thinking it the more important of the two. The Act of 1870 altered all this. The elementary education of the country became the concern of the State. The clergy were no longer the sole providers of schools. They had indeed provided those which the State found in existence and they were encouraged to provide more. But their default no longer left their parishes school-less; it only ensured the setting up of a State school. As we look back thirty years it seems strange that the significance of this change was not better understood. In giving voluntary schools a formidable rival in the shape of Board schools the Act took away one of the most effective inducements to the continuance of voluntary subscriptions. This was the origin of the 'intolerable strain' of which so much has been heard, and of the desire of the clergy to gain access to the inexhaustible fund out of which the Board schools were able to make good their deficiencies. For a long time, as the late Archbishop of Canterbury told us not long ago, this desire was kept in check by the fear that aid from the rates meant control by the ratepayers. In an evil hour some ingenious person bethought him of the plan which has been adopted in the new Act. Representation the ratepayers must have, but so long as a perpetual majority was assured to the denominational managers no great harm need come of this. The representative managers would grow weary of being perpetually outvoted, and in time they would cease to attend. But the contribution from the rates would survive their departure and place the Church schools on the secure financial level enjoyed by the Board schools. How far this expectation would have been borne out by the event we shall never know, because the introduction of the Kenyon-Slaney clause has imported into the Bill a new and graver mischief than any necessarily associated with rate aid. But even without this addition the new Education Act would in the end have been fatal to the value if not to the existence of Church schools. If, indeed, the Act had in express words given the clergy the control of the religious teaching and the managers the control of the secular educationwhich was what in the first instance was supposed to be intendedthe best of the Church schools would not have been injured. There would often have been friction, there would sometimes have been ill-will, but in the end the parson, if he were a resolute man, would have got his way. But he would have got it at the cost of a severe struggle, and how many of the clergy would have had the strength of purpose to carry on such a struggle? The object of the representative managers would have been to water down the religious teaching so as to make it suitable for all the children attending the school. This wish would certainly have been shared by some, very often by all, the denominational managers, and thus a united board would have been able to represent to the clergyman that he was imperilling the peace of the parish, and perhaps depriving Nonconformist children of the benefit of the religious lesson, for the sake of teaching the Church children dogmas which might equally well be imparted to them when they had left school and were preparing for confirmation. So put, the appeal would, I believe, have made a very strong impression on large numbers of the clergy, and in this way the religious teaching in Church schools would gradually have been assimilated to that of a good Board school. The clergy, however, as a body either refused to admit the existence of any such danger, or accepted it as at all events a less evil than the sale of their schools to the State. They forgot when they did so that the exclusive attention paid to voluntary schools had by this time become positively detrimental to the object for which those schools had been founded. That object was the religious education of the people. In the first instance, indeed, the Church had given secular instruction as well, but this was only because at that time there was no one else to do it. Down to 1870 all went smoothly. When pretty well every school was a Church school, there was no need to inquire whether religious teaching and secular teaching were separable or inseparable. After 1870, however, the face of things was altered. In spite of all the efforts of the supporters of voluntary schools, the Board schools first overtook and then passed them. Wherever a Church school was given up, a School Board got possession of it. Wherever a new parish was formed, the chances were that to provide school as well as church was more than the parishioners could compass, and the work. was left to a School Board. Every year, therefore, the number of children who ought to have been in Church schools grew larger and. the impossibility of ever bringing them into Church schools plainer. The utmost that was to be hoped from rate aid was the continuance of existing Church schools, yet every year the existing Church schools became more inadequate to the work they were designed. to do. The children belonging to the Church of England had insensibly distributed themselves into a declining minority which still attended Church schools, and a growing majority which attended Board schools. Hereafter I believe the clergy will look back with wonder at the indifference with which they had come to regard this latter class. It was simply an accident that the children included in it were not in a Church school, and that accident did not lessen in the least degree the responsibility of the clergy in regard to them. But it was a responsibility which the law forbade them to discharge in the most natural and convenient way. They could not follow the children into the Board schools and teach them their religion in the hour set apart for the religious lesson. It is fair to say that some time before the introduction of the present Act the bishops had made an effort to get the right of entry secured by law. In certain resolutions adopted by the joint committee of the Convocations of Canterbury and York, there is one asking that facilities may be granted to the clergy to give religious instruction to any of the children in Board schools whose parents may wish them to receive it, and offering similar opportunities for the entry of Nonconformist teachers into Church schools. The value attached to this proposal by its authors may be judged from the fact that it was not pressed upon the Government in the course of the negotiations which we must suppose to have been going on while the Bill was on the stocks. There must have been a time when the bishops were consulted or sounded as to the terms which would satisfy the Church, and, if the spiritual welfare of the vast army of children in Board schools had been very much in their thoughts, it is inconceivable that the Bill when it came should have contained no provision for their instruction. It has even been said— I do not know with what amount of truth-that there was a time when the Government were not indisposed to give the right of entry a prominent place in their measure and only abandoned the idea in deference to episcopal opposition. Anyhow the Church, so far as her mind could be gathered from the bishops, the Convocations, and the Diocesan Conferences, was willing to let those of her children who were in Board schools go untaught, provided that she was allowed to throw the maintenance of her own schools on the rates. It was certain that the denominational right of entry to all schools could not be carried through Parliament unless the Church was |