(3.) 1902 to 1906.

The position was well summarized in a National Society leaflet thus:—

In the year 1902 it became evident to the State that some resettlement of the education question was necessary. The Board Schools had, rightly or wrongly, exceeded their duties as defined by the Act of 1870, and were sharply pulled up by what is known as the Cockerton judgment. The managers of Church Schools were in no way desirous of being a drag on the advancing requirements of the day. All that they contended for was that if the State required more it should pay more, and that the concordat arrived at in 1870, upon the faith of which the Church had spent such large sums of money, should not be broken. Churchmen were quite willing to place their buildings at the disposal of the State for secular teaching, and to leave the State the whole control of secular teaching; but they said, "We cannot in any way allow this generosity of ours to prejudice our right to give, subject to the safeguard of a conscience clause, full religious teaching by men and women in whom we have confidence. We are willing to give up everything except our own religious teaching and the appointment of headteachers."

Logically, the new position created by the Act of 1902 was unassailable. The trouble is: it violated sentiment. The average Englishman deludes himself by describing himself as "a plain, straightforward, logical sort of person." Now, the one thing he is not, and never will be, is, logical—thank God! The average Englishman is governed, not by logic, but by sentiment. We pretend to hate and despise sentiment. We do nothing of the kind. We live on sentiment, socially, ecclesiastically, imperially; sometimes it even gets into business, and we refuse to he "hard on" some person who has done us wrong, and who, logically, ought to be prosecuted. This fact is illustrated by the Act of 1902. Logically, that Act was a perfectly symmetrical affair. The Act swelled itself out on its logic, and, puffing for breath, said to the world:—All teachers in all schools are doing State work, and so are State servants, and so must be paid by the State on the same scale; it is illogical to pay a teacher in a Voluntary School less than a teacher in a Board School: they are all equally civil servants, and must he treated alike, A logical and sound and unanswerable position! Moreover, we page 22 must unify and co-ordinate both primary and secondary education; therefore. We shall abolish School Boards and make the County Councils do the work in their own areas, (You will please understand that London had to be treated under a separate Bill. I am alluding to the general facts, common to both Acts.)

Further, the power of the parson must be curtailed, and so we shall put on every Voluntary School Committee of Managers representatives of the Local Authority. Parsons—it ie said—are pestilent fellows, and so we shall reduce their pestilential power to one-sixth of the Board of Managers Quite sound and logical!

Logic carried the Act a bit further; for it refused to interfere with Voluntary Schools by continuing to allow the Voluntary School Managers to appoint head-teachers of the faith professed by the Body who built the School; but logic, as I have already shown in connection with Sir W. Anson's Circular No, 512, trampled Church of England sentiment ruthlessly under foot in some matters of religious teaching. However, Churchmen, I suppose, don't make martyrs. Anyhow, they submitted.

But then logic trampled horribly on sentiment that was neither Anglican nor Roman. Logic said in the Act of 1902:—Here are all these Board Schools, they have been supported by the Rates since 1870: now that the State is doing this work, all schools must be supported equally out of the Rates. That logic produced the "Passive Resister," Logically, the "Passive Resister" has not got a shred of an argument. Sentimentally, the whole of the argument is on his side. The Englishman at Home and the Englishman abroad is the same: he lives on sentiment. There you have the whole point of the difficulty created by the Act of 1902. It was a logical Act, through and through; but it was not quite a sentimental Act.

Think it out like this:—Since 1870 the Churchman and the Nonconformist had paid taxes; a portion of those taxes went in grants to Voluntary Schools, as to Board Schools. Let me remind you: Grants came from the Imperial Exchequer only. Since 1870 the Churchman and the Nonconformist paid School Board Rates; the whole of those rate went to Board Schools, none to Voluntary Schools, The Churchman's conscience was not offended thereby. Men used to say: Caesar must have the things that belong to Caesar, but God must have the things that belong to God, and so the Churchman and the Roman Catholic paid a self-imposed further contribution to his National School. The Nonconformist paid his taxes and did not trouble his con- page 23 science about how much or how little got back through the Imperial Exchequer to a Voluntary School. But the moment the tax was turned into a rate, this man's conscience was offended, and he became a "Passive Resister." Logically, he is hopeless, You may argue to any extent, but the sentiment of "another Church rate" is stronger than argument. Figures prove, quite logically, that not one penny of the rate will go in Denominational teaching; that the rent value of Voluntary Schools, worth, say, £22,000,000, at 3¼ per cent, (a very low figure), is £715,000 per annum, and that that sum exceeds by £539,030 per annum the proportion of the cost of the maintenance of the Schools, which is represented by the time spent in teaching distinctive Church formularies—put it roughly at £175,000 per annum—you may do all these things, but he is hurt in his sentiment, and he won't pay, and there's an end of it.

Personally, I have both a sneaking contempt and a sneaking regard for the man. He means something. I don't mean quite the same thing that he means, but I know what he means. But, still expressing a personal opinion, I believe the Act of l902, through its unanswerable logic, offended a sentiment that is far deeper than that exhibited by "Passive Resistance:" it removed, not wholly, but to a considerable extent, the privilege that supporters of Voluntary Schools had of paying for their own religious convictions. No amount of "Passive Resistance" would ever destroy the Voluntary system; but relieving people of the privilege of paying for their religious convictions will, eventually destroy not only the Voluntary Schools, but all Religious Instruction in every school aided by Government in England. Religious Instruction is in the Council Schools (Board, up to 1902) only because the Voluntary Schools exist on the basis of definite Religion. When the Voluntary Schools go, all Religious Instruction will go. The standard will have gone; that's all. If you want proof: look at home, here in New Zealand. Why is the Bible proscribed in the curriculum of the State Schools? Simply because, with the exception of the Schools of the Church of Rome, there are practically no schools founded on the Christian Faith. When the Denominational Schools went in this country, in 1S77, the Bible went out of the educational curriculum, Believing, as I do, in the New Zealander, I believe that New Zealand will, as time goes on, be one of the first of the self-governing nations in the British Empire to proclaim the fact that schools without the Bible in the curriculum are a failure. Nonconformity says that to-day in New Zealand, because it has learned the lesson by experience. Nonconformity page 24 has not had the opportunity yet of learning this lesson at Home. The lesson is short but solemn: the day the Voluntary Schools go, the Bible goes from all schools. I have sometimes wondered why, with the actual logic of facts staring us in the face here in New Zealand, the various Nonconformist Ministers' Associations throughout this country have not urged their friends in the Old Country to make any sacrifice in order to keep the Voluntary School system permanent in England, so that the Bible may he preserved. I have seen it stated constantly that the Act of 1902 was privately arranged between the Bishops and the Government. Let me quote the present Archbishop of Canterbury in reply :—

"This suggestion, it cannot be too often or too emphatically stated, is absolutely without foundation. No single bishop, to the best of my belief, knew the contents of the Bill until it was completed and printed and was about to be introduced."

I will try and summarize the Act of 1902, as it affected, on one side, the Managers of Voluntary Schools; on the other, the Local Authority.

Put shortly, these meant that the teachers, if approved of by the Local Authority, were paid out of the Rates; but the Voluntary School supporters had still to pay for the repair, enlargment, or alteration of the buildings which the Local Authority got rent free.

If new schools were needed in any place, they could be provided either by voluntary effort or by the Local Authority. If page 26 a school was erected by voluntary effort, it was called a "non-provided" school; if by the Local Authority, "provided."

Under the Act, assistant teachers and pupil teachers might be appointed "without reference to religious creed or denomination" in any "non-provided" school. The head-teachers still were to be appointed in accordance with the trust-deed of the school, i.e., the head-teacher would belong to the faith which built that particular school; but assistants and pupil teachers need not necessarily do so.

Purposely omitting the Secondary Education part of the Act, I think I have mentioned the salient features of it as it affected Elementary Education.

The smooth working of this Act meant a good deal of "give-and-take" on both sides. Where that reasonable creed was adopted, things went all right: where either side wanted all "take" and no "give," things went all wrong. The number of parishes where things went smoothly was unquestionably very large; in a few cases there was friction. I take this statement from the "Official Year Book of the Church of England" for 1906:—"While the Act works generally well in England, it "cannot be denied that in some districts, such as the West Riding of Yorkshire, the Isle of Wight, and the Principality of Wales, the Act is not being fairly administered. It has been made abundantly clear by official statements in Parliament that in Wales, particularly, some of the Welsh Local Education Authorities have in every possible way neglected their statutory duties under the Act."

That is the last time I shall bore you with statistics. Before I pass on to the Act of 1906 let me touch on a point that conceivably may he in your mind. It is said that the State has paid Voluntary Schools such huge sums of money in grants since 1811, that the State has more than paid back the 45 millions of pounds which has been voluntarily spent on such schools, and that, therefore, the State is morally and legally justified if it forcibly annexes all the Voluntary Schools; indeed, they belong to the State over and over again. It is rather a comic sort of claim, and the morality urged savours of that in the old saying. "What's yours is mine, and what's mine is my own." If'such morality be adopted, we may expect tenants to say to landlords something like this:—You and yours built this house, and I and mine have been paying rent for it these scores of years; we have more than paid in rent what you paid in the building of the house; therefore, morally and legally, the house belongs to ue! If one argument is legal, so is the other. If one course is moral, so is the other.

Now we come to the Bill of 1906. Some wag has described it as being "neither religious or irreligious, but Birrell-igions." Its author is a master in English literature, whose "Obiter Dicta" is, in its way, one of the most charming of books. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the man's politics about Education "as by law established," one always has pleasure in reading even the oratorical fallacies of his speeches, couched in language that make them almost into literature.

Introducing his Bill, the present Minister for Education upheld rather an unfortunate standard for the fame of national character. Having alluded to "the religious difficulty," he proceeded to say: "But this, after all, is not the most important aspect of the question. It is most important to equip the children for proficiency in those arts and crafts and mechanical sciences which make nations famous. This is a necessity in these days of fierce competition. Until we can build and maintain a national shelter against the icy blasts of sectarian tests, which nip the buds of piety and reverence, we shall make small progress, and shall have no peace."

One cannot help being sorry, apart from all controversy or politics, that the nasty gospel of the "muck rake," of Success instead of Service, should be preached by a Minister of the Crown in the English House of Commons. However, you want to know the sort of "national shelter against the icy blasts of "sectarian tests which nip the buds of piety and revereaee" that is now proposed to be erected.

The salient features of the Bill, as introduced, and as amended, so far as I can make out from the cables, are these:—

Clause I. This is a short clause of only four lines, and reads thus: "On and after the first day of January, one thousand nine 'hundred and eight, a school shall not be recognised as a public elementary school unless it is a school provided by the Local Education Authority." This is the full, frank and free confession of faith on the part of the Government. Lest there should be any doubt about the frankness of the confession, the marginal heading repeats it in its negative form. There is no ambiguity or undenominationalism about this faith. The new form of educational creed is: "I believe in the extinction of all Voluntary Schools. I believe in making every person in the land keep this faith, promulgated in the twentieth century, whole and undefiled."

That really is what Clause 1 meanss. On and after January 1, 1908, the State will not allow any more public elementary schools to be built on the Christian Faith as foundation-stone. Such is the freedom of Religion proposed to he permitted in England by a Bill which is to afford "a national shelter against the icy blasts of sectarian tests which nip the buds of piety and reverence !"

You observe that, whether for weal or woe, the dual system disappears, and all the history I have outlined to-night is to be as if it had never been. There is to be no more variety of method in England's educational policy; every little child is to be brought up on the same dead level of elementary educational sameness. Liberty of conscience in religion, so far as public elementary education is concerned, is, by this clause, forbidden "on and after January 1, 1908," to every Churchman, Roman Catholic, loyal Wesleyan, and earnest Jew. It will be an interesting thing to observe the sort of English citizens who, in future years, will keep January 1 as a great festival of thanksgiving for religious liberty!

Clause 2 has to do with conditions of transfer of Voluntary Schools from their managers, some of whom are Trustees, to the Local Authority. As introduced, the Local Authority could refuse to take over a school. As amended, the Bill gives them no option about taking over a Voluntary School if the managers so demand. You recollect these Voluntary Schools are called non-provided." Certain conditions are allowable for the transfer. I need not trouble you with them, for they do not essentially contradict the confession of faith recited in Clause 1. But section 2 of this Clause 2 is quaint; it is almost mediaeval in the moral- page 29 ity it propounds:—it gives the managers of Voluntary Schools entire freedom to break their trust and tear up their trust-deeds. The words of absolution in the section are plenary and deliciously sacerdotal:—"The owners of the school-house of any existing Voluntary School, which is subject to charitable trusts, shall have full power, notwithstanding those trusts," etc., etc., etc. Now, no man will be found to deny that the power of Parliament is absolute; but I think a good many men will be found to deny the proposition embodied in this section. It sounds rather like justification of robbery from the person, a proceeding hard to justify in morals. The "Guardian" (18. iv. 06) puts it thus:—Parliament is not morally justified in "confiscating property that has been accumulated by the generosity or the self-sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of people during, the last century—accumulated, too, with its own encouragement and approval."

I know that some one will immediately say:—Oh! but the Bill provides for the payment of rent by the Local Authority to the Trustees. Well, let us look into this: it comes under Clauses 8 (2) (b) and 10. In Clause 8 (2) (b) excellent care is taken for suggesting reasons for whittling down the rent; and there is still more illumination thrown on the matter by again carefully studying the words of Clause 2 (1). That clause brings in the Education Department. Now, the Education Department has had: to deal with this question of renting Voluntary Schools in the past, and it has always ruled that, unless the trust-deed of the school gave a power to lease, the rent should not exceed 5/ per annum. Of course, under the present Minister, the Education Department may reverse the traditions in this, as in other, respects. Perhaps that fear was in the back of the mind of the prominent Diseptablisher who asserted gravely that the Bill was "marked by generosity up to the point of injustice!"

But Clause 10 makes the tightening-up procedure complete: it enacts that "Where the school-house of an existing Voluntary school is held under charitable trusts, the Local Education Authority, if they require the use of the school-house. . . . and have not obtained such use under this Act, shall be entitled to have, without payment, such use. . . ." The use "without payment" is, it is true, limited to one year; but the meaning of the clause is obvious-:—If you don't make terms, you'll get none; we are going to squeeze you, Church Schools, out; we said it in Clause 1, and we repeat it in Clause 10.

However, be this as it may, my own hope is that the owners, trustees, of Voluntary Schools, of every sort, will combine and page 30 say to the Government:—These schools are not for sale; they were not built for the purpose of making money; they were-built for specific purposes, and are held under specific trusts; those specific purposes remain, and Parliament cannot, by any legislation, convert malfeasance of trust into a moral action.

Anyhow, I am fairly certain that some School Managers will be found to say that sort of thing, and act on it.

It is clear that this aspect of the Bill has made some Church folks very careful about securing the legitimate and honourable disposal of money, for which they are trustees. In one of the districts of Cheltenham the Church people have recently erected a building which they intended to give the State the use of for secular education, as a new elementary school. Wisely, the trustees are not now handing over this building, which has cost £1000, until they have some security that the specific purposes of their trust will be observed by the State.

Clause 3. This has to do with what are called "Ordinary Facilities for Special Religions Instruction," in other words, Denominational teaching. By this clause such teaching may be given:—(1) When it is made one of the conditions of transfer. (2) That such teaching only takes place on two mornings in the week. (3) Such teaching is not to be given by the School Staff.

Then comes Clause 4, which is called "Extended Facilities for Special Religious Instruction if Parents Generally Desire It." This clause is the one about which we have had many cables during the last few days. To-day's cables tell us that Clause 4 has been adopted—by a diminished majority. What exactly has been adopted, I find it very hard to understand. I can therefor only give you my impression of the case, an impression which can only be verified when we get our London papers of this week.

As the Bill was introduced, the Local Authority was given an option about permitting "extended facilities." The Roman Catholic Church secured a promise that the option should be made an obligation, i.e., "shall was to be substituted for "may." But even then, the clause was only to apply to urban areas, which are defined to be the County of London, and places of 5000 population. Further, before granting the "extended facilities," the Local Authority was to satisfy itself, by holding a public enquiry, that the parents of four-fifths of the children attending the schools desired such "extended facilities."

Here are the cables, as published in our daily papers:—