We regret that it is impossible for us within these limits to produce the evidence on which Mr. Senior and Mr. Chadwick rest these conclusions: it is ample and authentic, being derived from the most experienced and highly qualified teachers in the country. We must confine ourselves to two passages, the first from Mr. Morrison, Rector of the Free Church Training School in Glasgow, who says:

'I am of opinion that much of what is taught in elementary schools is comparatively useless, unfitted for children, and in many cases positively prejudicial; and particularly I hold a very decided opinion that the hours of school attendance are unreasonably long. I will undertake to teach 100 children in three hours a day as much as they can by possibility receive; and I hold it to be an axiom in education, that no lesson is given until it has been received. As soon, therefore, as the receiving power of the children is exhausted, anything given is useless-nay, injurious, inasmuch as you thereby weaken instead of strengthen the receiving power. This ought to be a first principle in education. I doubt it is seldom acted on."

The second, from Miss Carpenter, is to the same effect:

'I feel confident, from my experience and observation, that the real education of the working classes would be improved by devoting three hours a day instead of five or six to direct intellectual instructions, the faculties of the children being strengthened and trained in other ways by industrial occupation, which developes many powers comparatively untouched by book learning. The education thus becomes more real and the knowledge more fixed in the mind, and more likely to be permanently useful.'

The general inference from the whole of these facts, is that by a better application of the grants, the voluntary subscriptions, and the teaching power already in existence, the work of popular education may be effectually performed without any augmentation of these resources.

Mr. Senior recommends that the authorities of the Privy Council should guide their policy in this direction, and endeavour to combat the prejudices of the managers of schools, who are always unwilling to abandon an existing system. But one of the evils of Government supervision is that having prescribed a certain standard or method of education, it tends rather to prevent than to encourage improvements, by tying the managers of schools down to fixed rules; and these rules, though useful and necessary for one purpose, or in one place, may produce effects the most injurious and absurd in others.

It will be perceived from the foregoing remarks that we think the local distribution of public funds by the State, with the most laudable motives, and with the utmost vigilance,

is nevertheless inseparable from many grave evils. Mr. Senior is of the opposite opinion. He lays it down as an axiom that it is as much the duty of the community to see that 'a child is educated, as it is to see that a child is fed; and 'that unless the community can and will compel the parent 'to feed the child, or to educate the child, the community 'must do so.' He adds,' that it is the duty of the State to aid 'private benevolence in supplying the sum that is not obtain'able from the parent.' But in fact Mr. Senior goes on to show by evidence, that nothing is more unequal than this appeal to private benevolence. He quotes numerous cases in which non-resident proprietors, drawing large incomes from the soil, will do nothing for the schools of their tenantry, because the law makes no claim upon them: and if the poor are to be instructed at all, it must be in great part at the cost of the elergyman, on whom a very undue share of the burden is thrown. The conduct of the English clergy in this respect has been most noble and self-denying. Mr. Fraser informs us (Report, vol. ii. p. 74.) that in the Dorset district, an average subscribing clergyman contributes to the school expenditure eleven times as much as an average subscribing farmer, six times as much as an average subscribing householder, and (with probably not half the income) twice as much as an average subscribing landowner. If schools exist all over the country, it is mainly to the private exertions and contributions of the clergy that they are due; but we confess we are not satisfied with the justice of an arrangement which practically taxes one class in the community to an enormous amount, and leaves the rateable property of the parish untouched. Mr. Senior's premisses are too broad for his conclusions. He compares the duty of educating the young to the duty of feeding them: but what would he say to a poor law which should be based on distribution of money by a central Board at Whitehall in proportion to the funds that could be raised in the country by voluntary almsgiving? His argument that it is more just to throw the burden on the 500 millions of general income of the nation than on the 80 millions of rateable income, applies with equal force to the poor rates; and by a parity of reasoning, the whole maintenance of paupers might be transferred to the Consolidated Fund. To the consequences of such a measure, we are satisfied that no one is more alive than Mr. Senior himself. The argument that it would be unjust to transfer a charge now levied on 500 millions of national income to 80 millions of rateable income is also relied on by Sir James Kay Shuttleworth. But it appears to us to contain a fallacy. A

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man's rateable property is in the main a test of his general property. He is rated, for instance, on the annual value of the house he lives in, not because that house is his only property, but because it affords an ostensible criterion of his general property and his station in life. We can discover no valid reason against the incidence of school rates, which does not apply with equal force against the incidence of all the rates now levied in a county or a parish.

We regret that it is impossible for us, within our present limits, to enter as fully as we could wish to do on the question of educational endowments. The subject is one requiring a separate notice, and it is treated with ability in the fifth part of the Commissioners' Report. The annual value of these educational charities is now computed at about 400,000l. a-year. The magnificent endowment of Christ's Hospital amounts to 60,000l. a-year, and we have recently had occasion to make some remarks on the collegiate property of Eton College. It must, however, be remarked that by far the larger portion of these old endowments was not designed to promote what is now meant by popular education, and it may be questioned how far grammar schools' fall within the scope of this Commission. The Commissioners, however, having in view the undoubted abuses in these endowments, and the want of power to correct these abuses, have made up their minds on the subject, and they recommend that the administration of the endowed schools, with ample powers over them, be vested in the Privy Council, or rather (as we infer) in the Education Committee of the Privy Council; and they are desirous of placing our whole system of 'public education, so far as it is connected with Government, in "the same official hands.'

6

This proposal appears to us in the highest degree objectionable. We have already shown that it is an entire delusion to suppose that the Privy Council has any administrative powers, or is qualified to exercise them. They are in fact exercised in the matter of primary education by the clerks acting in the name of that body. Even under this amount of business the office is admitted to be breaking down at its centre.' Yet with singular inconsistency it is proposed to throw on the same department the administration of educational charities, and even to sever them from the Charity Commissioners, to whom they belong.

In other words, this would be to place in the hands of a political department of the Government and its officers an authority, superior even to the law, in reference to trusts producing 400,000Z. a year, and to invest the Privy Council with a direct authority

over the property and interests of a large class of the community. Indeed, they go so far as to propose that the powers of the Court of Chancery, in framing schemes and modifying the provisions of founders, should be transferred to the Privy Council, which would become a sort of permanent Commission for the regulation of these matters. The whole plan is drawn up with a misconception of the functions and constitution of the Privy Council, which is almost incredible, when we recollect that two of the most distinguished members of the Commission are also members of that body. But the evil of throwing purely administrative and legal functions of this kind upon an office of State, presided over by a leading political minister, must be obvious. On constitutional grounds it would be most improper to place this vast amount of patronage and influence, affecting almost all the local endowments of the kingdom, in the hands of a Minister of the Crown: and for the performance of the necessary legal duties, the Lord President of the Council would, in nine cases out of ten, be totally unfit.

We so far agree with the Commissioners, that we think it would be desirable to place the administration of the education. grant and the control over educational endowments in the same hands. But to effect that object, we should recommend a contrary course of proceeding. Instead of transferring the Charities to the Privy Council, we should greatly prefer to transfer the education grant, and the whole staff of officers by whom it is now administered in the name of the Privy Council, to the Charity Commission. Or, in other words, we think that the time is come when a Board of Education and Charities might with great propriety be formed, on the model, not of a great office of State, but of the Poor Law Board. Such a board ought to have as little as possible of a political character. would simply be an administrative department, represented by its Chairman in the House of Commons. By the adoption of this plan the Charity Commissioners would gain more power and importance, which they greatly require, and the duties now performed by the Education Committee would be brought within a more moderate compass.

It

The result of the inquiry now before us, on our own minds, is that it is desirable materially to circumscribe the action of the central authority and to reduce the sums now distributed by that authority, not for the purpose of doing less for popular education, but, on the contrary, for the purpose of doing much more by local agency, by local taxation, and by independent means. We agree with the minority, rather than with the majority of the Commission, in the opposite opinions recorded

in their Report. Without denying the benefits which have been conferred by the education grants, and the salutary impulse they have given to education, we think the time is approaching when the education of the people ought to walk without these leading strings; and we think that no greater censure upon the system could be uttered than to assert that schools and teachers are protected institutions and a protected class of persons, who can only subsist and flourish as long as they are the objects of State management and State contributions.

'These members of the Commission (the minority) desire that, a good type of schools and teachers having now been extensively introduced, the benefits of popular education having been manifested, and public interest in the subject having been thoroughly awakened, Government should abstain from making further grants, except grants for the building of schools, to which the public assistance was originally confined, and the continuance of which will be fair towards the parishes which have hitherto received no assistance; that the annual grants which are now made should be gradually withdrawn; and that Government should confine its action to the improvement of union schools, reformatories, and schools connected with public establishments, at the same time developing to the utmost the resources of the public charities, which either are or may be made applicable to popular education, and affording every facility which legislation can give to private munificence in building and endowing schools for the poor. It appears to them that if the State proceeds further in its present course, and adopts as definitive the system which has hitherto been provisional, it will be difficult hereafter to induce parental and social duty to undertake the burden which it ought to bear, or to escape from the position, neither just in itself nor socially expedient, that large and ill-defined classes of the people are entitled, without reference to individual need, or to the natural claims which any of them may possess on the assistance of masters and employers, to have their education paid for, in part at least, out of the public taxes. Nor do they feel confident that Government will ever be able to control the growing expenditure and multiplying appointments of a department, the operations of which are regulated by the increasing and varying demands of philanthropists rather than by the definite requirements of the public service.' (Report, p. 298.)

It is impossible, from the extent to which the Committee of Council has already contracted engagements with the rising generations of teachers and with the managers of schools, that any sudden diminution can be made in the grants; but we are strongly of opinion that measures ought, without delay, to be taken to prevent future disappointment. The largest item in the estimates is the expenditure on training teachers. It is the more urgent to limit this vote, because the system contains a germ of indefinite expansion, and is already producing a number