In relation to external history of this matter, as distinguished from the action of the Board in relation to it, it may be important to keep in view the fact that on the page 6 Board's behalf the only reason alleged for the action has been the erection of Waitaki High School. In a letter intended for the people of Oamaru, published in the North Otago Times on the morning of the public meeting of the 29th October, 1883, Professor Shand, as Chairman of the Board, carefully explained as the one reason for disrating the Oamaru School that the erection of the Waitaki High School, making a statutory provision for secondary education in the district, had, in effect, made it necessary for the Board to discontinue the maintenance of the Oamaru School for secondary education. The ground thus taken had reference, not to anything about the management of the school, but solely to the constitution of it as a school of secondary education. And, after it has become clear that the Board have no power of law to tamper with the constitution, still the one real ground alleged for the Board's proceedings has had reference to the constitution, as being a thing superseded and made useless by the erection of Waitaki School. The citizens of Oamaru, on the other hand, have not allowed themselves to be led, in the interest of their town school, into any assault upon the Waitaki School. That school, they have represented, is under a Board of Governors, who are not responsible either to the people of Oamaru or to the Education Board, and who are fully entrusted by the nation with the constitution and administration of it according to their own judgment for the purpose of its existence. And in relation to it what falls to be said to the Board is this:—

(1).	In fact, the Waitaki School does not, and cannot, serve the purpose of a town school of Ormaru for secondary education. Its working constitution excludes all girls, and the scale of fees makes it practically inaccessible to those boys within whose reach the Education Act proposes to place means of qualified systematic secondary instruction.
(2).	The Oamaru people have no power of right to reconstruct the constitution and administration of Waitaki School, so as to adjust it to the requirements of the town, or make it for their sons and daughters equivalent to a people's school of easily attainable sound secondary education.
(3).	Above all, the people already have a school for that purpose, which has come down to them as an inheritance from the old provincial constitutions of Otago, now guaranteed to them by the education Act of New Zealand. And over this school the Education Board has by law no power of life and death: in relation to the school their only power, their statutory duty, is to maintain it as a school of secondary education under the Act.