the experience of some years is required before managers are able to do their work efficiently, as it necessitates not only knowledge of the regulations of the schools, but of the teachers and the habits of the parents and children.'

Two or three things are necessary to make a good manager. (1) Interest in the work, (2) education, (3) leisure. In some parts of London the social conditions do not supply enough persons combining these qualities, and it has been found that some of the best managers are those who are willing to come from a distance It has been suggested that the local management should be delegated to the borough councils, who should, perhaps, in the larger boroughs group the schools into subdivisions.

But for effective management small groups are necessary. The School Board after long experience have come to the conclusion that a group of three schools is as many as one set of managers can properly look after, and it is clear that such a number would not correspond with the idea of local management through borough

councils.

Take Bethnal Green, Shoreditch and Hackney. These three local areas have sixty-one board schools, and it is clear that local management of fifteen to twenty schools would lose all the advantages of the local management which the School Board now secures. It may be a very good thing to associate local municipal activity with some knowledge of the schools, and in a group of twelve or fifteen managers the local municipal authority might be invited to nominate three; but it is of the greatest importance that the essentially local character of the management be maintained, and also that the final voice of the London authority be paramount. Of all matters concerned with school management, the two most important in this respect are the appointment of teachers and disciplinary action over them. If anything were done to entrust patronage to local municipalities a serious blow would be struck at the self-respect and the efficiency of the teaching staff.

The School Board have a strict rule against canvassing. This rule is often broken, but while the final appointment rests with a body far removed from local influence canvassing is less effective and comparatively harmless. But if patronage were vested in the borough councils there is a great danger that the teaching staff would be drawn into local politics, and that there would be a close relation between political support and promotion. In disciplinary matters, too, serious offences might be condoned where the offender was closely connected politically with a leading member of the local school management committee. I am confident that the best teachers must value the independence and impersonality of the action of the London School Board in questions of promotion and

discipline, and though no doubt there is a leaning to leniency on the part of the professional colleagues of an offender, yet they would suffer most as a profession if the standard of professional and personal honour were lowered by the retention on the staff of the black sheep of the service.

The same remarks that have been made on the day schools apply to the evening schools. Effective direct control and management in a central body are necessary to efficiency in the working of the schools.

Assuming that such considerations as the above have weight in preventing the attempt to mix subordinate authorities with the general educational authority for London, there has been another plan largely talked of that of constituting an effective central authority, but building it up out of the borough councils by representation. This, in fact, would be turning over the education of London to a Water Board. Such a scheme would be objectionable for several reasons. It would, indeed, give us a board ad hoc with independent rating power, but it would give us a board at two degrees removed from the effective influence of the electorate, who could hardly consider in the choosing of their borough councillors the subsequent choice these would make of some one person to represent them on an education authority.

It would be objectionable because it would confer the power of taxing on persons who did not represent the ratepayers. No doubt the representatives of the borough councils would indirectly represent the ratepayers, but the added elements representing educational interests would in no way give effect to the principle of taxation accompanying representation, and it might well be that these added elements might determine a rate against the wishes of a majority of the elected representatives. There is something to be said for the presence of educational experts on a committee if the supreme power is in the County Council, but to create a body largely removed from the influence of the electorate and confer on it taxing power is too great a departure from the modern recognition of the rights of the electorate.

Moreover, an education authority far removed from the popular forces of election will not have sufficient energy or force to do the work required, if our education is to be brought up to the mark, and having regard to the large aid to be given to privately managed schools, it is not desirable that persons representing the interests to be aided should have a final voice in determining how much public money they should have.

If the London hospitals were to be aided from the rates we should not think it equitable that the Asylums Board should vote the money and that the representatives of the hospitals should sit on the Asylums Board.

The last device by which the borough councils may be gratified is to make the education committee a committee of the County Council with final financial control reserved to the latter, but to make the committee not mainly representative of the County Council. As there are twenty-nine borough councils, the presence of twenty-nine borough council representatives, especially if fortified by some fifteen experts, would require the County Council to nominate some fifty of its own members on the committee to keep the statutory majority. I am not prepared to say that such a body would be too large to do the work of education. There will be a great deal to do and much new work, which for some time will tax the time and ability of the members; but the question is whether this is the best kind of body to do the work.

If a paramount authority is not sufficiently represented on its committee, which is composed very largely not by it, but for it, there will be a tendency for the higher educational authority not to accept the recommendations of its committee. A common feeling and unity of purpose between the authority and its committee are essential to the good working of the scheme.

Again, what is to be gained by this large representation of the borough councils? The County Council itself presumably would take care that all parts of London were represented by the members of the Council, and after that has been secured, undoubtedly the work will best be helped by the co-optation of persons who will be able and willing to give much time to the work. But borough councils will probably put their own members on the education committee— that is, as a rule, people in business and who by their activity on the borough council have secured a leading position there. Such people will not have much time for the added work, nor probably much inclination to master its details.

There is a danger, therefore, that the due consideration of the important matters which will demand an early decision will be hurried over or left to the permanent officials. Few people realise how exceptionally troublesome will be the financial relations between the public authority and the aided schools, the former having no effective way of enforcing its requirements but by appeal to the Board of Education, with the one Draconian sanction of closing the school. The relations of the various States of the United States under the old constitution, of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and of the Swiss Federation in the eighteenth century, will give illustrations of the difficulties of the task before the new authority And the body now under consideration would combine the maximum of inexperience, want of leisure, and want of interest; the borough council element, I fear, would introduce an element, if not of jobbery, at any rate of excessive desire to look on patronage as an important part of their public functions.

The accumulated experience of the members of the School Board is discarded. Fortunately the able staff of School Board officials will remain, and unless the County Council treat them as mere underlings, subordinate to existing County Council officials, they will do much to help the new authority in the first trying years of their work. I wish, however, that I could look forward more hopefully to the intentions and practical ability of the Government in the scheme which they are planning, I fear after consultation not with those who know the educational needs of London, but with wirepullers of the local Tory party.

E. LYULPH STANLEY.

MACEDONIA AND ITS REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEES

IN 1856 the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was solemnly accepted as an article of political faith, and guaranteed by the delegates of the European Powers, assembled in Paris. The same year gave birth to a movement which has robbed that Empire of province after province, and which, under the name of the Macedonian Question, threatens sooner or later to rob it of its very existence. It was on the morrow of the Treaty of Paris that the Bulgarians of Macedonia, instigated by the apostles of Panslavism, began to recover the national consciousness, which in the course of ages of dependence and darkness had completely died out. At the conquest of Constantinople Mohammed II. conferred on the Greek Patriarch the title of Head of the Roman Nation, a comprehensive term including all the Christian subjects in his dominions without distinction of speech or race. During the ensuing four centuries the Bulgarians, in common with the rest of Eastern Christians, continued under the ægis of the Ecumenical Patriarch, unambitious and inconscient, or rather proud of the appellation of Roman, which in the East means Greek. But they were not allowed to remain for ever in this theological stage of development. Soon after the Crimean War the emissaries of the Panslavic societies of the North, henceforth to be considered as unofficial interpreters of Russia's official policy, entered upon their nationalist work in the Balkans. The Greek language was gradually banished from the schools and churches in the districts inhabited by Slavs. Books printed in Russia were distributed broadcast among the inhabitants, and the young Bulgars of Macedonia were taught to look upon the Greek Church as an institution foreign to them, upon their former teachers as tyrants, upon themselves as the legitimate heirs of the Byzantine Emperors, upon the Greeks as their natural foes, and, last but not least, upon Alexander the Great as a national hero, and upon Aristotle as a national philosopher, usurped by the unscrupulous Greeks. The animosity which this new teaching implanted and fostered in the Slavonic mind, just awakening from its sleep of centuries, reached its maturity in 1860, when a deputation of Orthodox Bulgarians astonished the Sublime Porte by submitting to it their desire to establish an independent community,