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'system, with its local and denominational subdivisions, and 'with its detailed appropriations, it would break down at its centre, 'unless you provided a much greater establishment than I think 'Parliament or the country would be willing in the long run to 'agree to.' But no clear account is given by the Report of the original structure and present strength of this centre,' on which everything depends. We shall endeavour in some degree to supply this deficiency.

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It was, we believe, far more by accident than by design that a Committee of the Privy Council and a branch of the Council Office have gradually assumed the functions of the department of Public Education. In the year 1838 a letter was addressed by Lord John Russell, then Home Secretary, to the Marquis of Lansdowne, then Lord President of the Council, proposing that a Committee of Council should be appointed by Her Majesty, consisting exclusively of members of the 'Government, for the purpose of considering all matters affect'ing the education of the people, and of superintending the "application of any sums which may be voted by Parliament:' and in pursuance of this recommendation an Order in Council was passed in 1839 constituting such a Committee; but the words for the purpose of considering all matters affecting the ' education of the people' were omitted from the order; and we have the authority of Lord Lansdowne himself, in his speech of the 5th July, 1839, for stating that the functions of the Committee were confined to superintending the distribution of grants. Lord Lansdowne declared on the same occasion that a permanent settlement was at present quite out of the question; and that the present arrangement was of a temporary 'nature, liable to be modified at pleasure, and revised at any moment, or enlarged if it should be found to work well for the 'country.'

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In the circumstances in which the Education question then stood, this experimental and tentative course of proceeding was a fortunate and judicious one. The Treasury, which had for some years administered the grant of 20,000l. for England a year through the religious societies, was ill qualified to promote the cause of education. The Marquis of Lansdowne, on the contrary, then Lord President, was of all Lord Melbourne's Cabinet the statesman who had long shown the most enlightened interest in the education of the people- an interest,which is one of the glories of his most useful and patriotic life. Moreover, at the very outset of these proceedings, a great principle was to be asserted and a great battle was to be fought. That principle was the right and duty of the State to take a part in the edu

cation of the country, co-ordinate with that claimed and taken by the Church and by the other religious societies. He who recollects the panic which had possession of men's minds on that occasion, the extravagance of the language used both in and out of Parliament, and the violent appeals made to religious fanaticism in every form, will think it fortunate that in the struggle of 1839 and the following years, the cause of liberal education was, in some measure, sheltered from the attacks of the Church and the Tories by the dignity and authority of the Privy Council, and that the Privy Council was presided over at that time by a Minister of consummate prudence, tact, and moderation. It is probable, too, that considerable advantage did arise from the establishment, by a Committee of Ministers of the Crown, of certain leading principles which have ever since regulated the chief proceedings of the department.

But, if the truth be told, the connexion of the Committee of Education with the Privy Council is purely nominal and imaginary. It occupies rooms in the same office; it originally employed some Privy Council clerks, none of whom now remain in its service; its responsible head is the Lord President; some of its appointments are made by the Queen in Council; but in all other respects it is as distinct from the Privy Council as the Board of Trade, which was also a branch of the Council Office in former times, and still retains the title of a Committee for Trade and Plantations. The Privy Council is essentially a deliberative, and in part a judicial, body; whose duty it is to advise the Sovereign, more especially in the exercise of the prerogatives of the Crown. It is a great office of State; its President is the second layman in the order of precedence, and always a statesman of high rank, both social and political; it has (with slight exceptions) no inherent executive or administrative functions, duties, or powers; but it serves principally to give to the measures of the executive departments the form and authority of acts of the Sovereign. Clearly an office of this character, and thus constituted, had no connexion whatever with the business of popular education; and the more the Education Committee became surcharged with administrative details, the less fit were the Lords of the Privy Council to deal with them. The Marquis of Lansdowne was succeeded in the office of Lord President by Lord Wharncliffe ; the Duke of Buccleuch, Earl Granville, Lord John Russell, the Earl of Lonsdale, and the Marquis of Salisbury have since filled the same post. These are all men of the highest station; some of them leaders of their party in the Houses of Parliament; all of them taking a prominent part in the great

affairs of the nation. But is there one of them who would have been selected, or who would have consented, to conduct the minutiae of inspection, assistance, and control of primary schools for little boys and girls, if this duty had not been imposed upon him by a strange and anomalous confusion between the office of a Minister of State and the duties of a School Board? In addition to these considerations, we agree with Mr. Chester, in his evidence (p. 101.), that the system of placing the education of the country under the control of a department of the political Government is vicious in the extreme.

We have said that we think the establishment of the Committee of Council in 1839 was favourable to the cause of liberal education, especially in the battle which shortly afterwards ensued; but since the Committee of Council has become, what it has now been for many years, a mere administrative Board, we think that its nominal connexion with the Privy Council is an inconvenience, an evil, and to some extent an imposition on the public. The Committee itself has, of course, been less and less frequently convoked, and never except for the consideration of some general minute. The Lords President, being charged with numerous and weighty cares of state, have neither time nor inclination to conduct the intricate petty details of an overloaded department. Indeed it has been thought necessary to create a new political office, styled the Vice Presidency of the Committee of Council of Education, with a salary equal to that of the Lord President himself, for the express purpose of relieving the Minister and conducting the educational business in the House of Commons. But the actual result of this attempt to manage an executive department with machinery entirely unfitted to the purpose, is that the department has had to create its own machinery; in other words, it has become the most entirely bureaucratic of all the offices now existing in this country; and we mean by that term an office in which the subordinate members of the department do in reality exercise an almost absolute authority under the 'clarum et venerabile nomen' of the Privy Council of England. Mr. Lingen has himself stated in his evidence that Vice 'Presidents, who have been in the Committee of Council and have seen other departments on a large scale, state that the 'complication of this system is far greater than they have seen anywhere else.' And the Commissioners agree with him as to the extreme difficulty of extending the present system to the whole country. Offices which exercise, as they do in continental administration, an immense amount of central power over minute details, have a constant tendency to render that

power more engrossing and absolute. The Education Department is, we believe, the only public office in England which attempts anything of the kind. It is of the essence of English administration, as contrasted with foreign bureaucratic administration, to leave details, in great part, to local agents and authorities. The consequence is that the establishment of the Education Department, with its fourteen senior officers, fifty clerks, and sixty inspectors, exceeds in amount the whole strength of the office of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and is yet quite insufficient to discharge the incalculable amount of work thrown upon it.

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Mr. Lingen stated in his evidence, with great truth, that the only public Department to which the Education Department, if greatly extended, in order to administer the present system, could be compared, would be the great Revenue Departments or the Post Office. Thus, to take the case of pupil-teachers alone, the Committee paid, in the year 1859, to and on account of 15,224 pupil-teachers, the sum of 252,550. 12s. 11d. in more than 20,000 separate payments. To perform this sort of work an office should be organised like a savings' bank or a post office. Every assisted and inspected school in the country, to the number of about 7000, is taught to correspond with the office,' and to look to the office' for guidance and control.* Every schoolmaster, schoolmistress, and incipient pupil-teacher, to the number of at least 20,000, is taught to consider himself or herself as a sort of Government employé, drawing Government pay. The moral effects of such a system are, in our opinion, as injurious to the independence and self-respect of the community as they are onerous to the State. It is the proud distinction of this country that we conduct our affairs without the interference of the State: but in this matter of popular education, the centralised interference of the State has been carried to the very last excess, until even the officers of the department declare that on this system the whole machinery must break down at the centre. Nor is this the whole evil. We are unwilling to speak with any harshness of the opinions of Mr. Matthew Arnold, whose name, whose

*To give a single example of the enormous quantity of minute business this department attempts to conduct. Mr. Arnold, himself an inspector, informs us (p. 93.) that an English inspector's visit to any elementary school expends six sheets and a half of excellent foolscap, -an amount to be multiplied by nine or ten thousand schools!

This is precisely the paperasserie which is the curse of foreign administration. The number of papers sent up every year to the Examiners by the pupil-teachers is stated to be 280,000!

talents, and whose character entitle him to our regard and respect. But we must say that the whole tone of his Report on the popular education of France betokens a propensity to adopt the bureaucratic spirit of continental administration to a degree which is painful and repugnant to the mind of every liberal Englishman. God forbid that public spirit in this country should be so dead, or the upper classes of this country so dull to their duties and their true interests (as Mr. Arnold appears to think they are beginning to be), that we should consign our first social concerns to the paid officials of the State, and make State administration the panacea of social evils! It is a lamentable proof of the effect of official mechanism on the mind, that a man of Mr. Arnold's broad and liberal disposition should have narrowed his judgment to this servile principle.

Extreme centralisation lies at the root of the whole matter. The officers of the Education Committee, being the dispensers of large sums of public money on principles determined by themselves, have taken care that for every pound so bestowed they have retained to the State a corresponding amount of power. The only limit to that power is their own organisation, which cannot embrace the whole range of duties created and continually extended by its own agency. The problem is not an easy one; for it will readily be admitted that great vigilance and minute attention were required to check the misappropriation of public money, and that large sums of public money were required to give a salutary impulse to the work of education. But the question now is, how long and to what extent are these grants of public money to be continued? To answer this question we must examine the principal objects to which the grants have been applied.

The first object to which the Committee of Council turned its attention was the building, enlarging, repairing, and furnishing of elementary schools. The sum spent by Government for these purposes in twenty years is about 1,050,000l.; and it is satisfactory to think that this sum represents less than half the capital devoted to this laudable purpose, the other and the larger moiety having in all cases been raised by voluntary contributions. But it is evident that the demand on the public purse for school buildings is not interminable. The schools already under inspection are so far from being full that they could contain 200,000 children more than they do at present. (Report, p. 83.) The number of localities deficient in school accommodation must be diminishing every year: a school-house once built is a permanent institution: we conceive therefore that this portion of the grant may be so far reduced as to keep

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