thousands of parents too poor, or too idle, or too dissolute, to do without the little earnings of their children, or, perhaps, too ignorant and too careless to know the value of education for them. Their little ones are the absentees or the irregular comers. Something must be done to remedy these crying evils. What is it to be? The Education Act suggests compulsion, and arms the Boards with compulsory powers. These powers were but permissive, but one Board after another has accepted the responsibility, and affirmed the absolute necessity of exercising them; and the districts which have no School Boards are crying out for some compulsory machinery which shall extend to them. Public opinion has on the whole supported these views and these resolutions. Even our national dislike of compulsion in any shape, and our jealous anxiety for individual liberty of parent or child, have given way. We are beginning to find, in this as in other matters, that we must have some government, some coercion of licence and selfishness, when they clothe themselves in the sacred garb of Liberty. Another great experiment is to be made: we rejoice that it is to be attempted, and wish it all success. But the task will certainly be one of extreme delicacy and difficulty. It must be so carried out as to retain the support of public opinion, especially in the classes chiefly concerned; and this it will not do, unless it carefully avoids undue precipitation, and uses discrimination and even tenderness to avoid infliction of real hardship. The experience of the compulsory system in America (although authorities vary respecting it) is on the whole somewhat discouraging. Laws stringent in theory, and a dead letter in practice, are worse than useless; they simply demoralize a people. And what can we say of the working of such compulsory Acts as we have in England? Look at the results of the Vaccination Act. In the face of the most decisive medical statistics known, under the terror of what we fondly deemed an almost extinct species of epidemic in London, still the law is defied, and the authorities, it seems, dare not enforce it. Yet smallpox is more easily recognised as an evil than ignorance, and the sending a child to school is a greater sacrifice than allowing it to be vaccinated. Evidently we are on dangerous ground. We must not on that account stop or hesitate; but we must look to our feet. The worst difficulty will not be with the vagabond classes, the children who are neither at school nor at work, but who are haunting the streets, living on waifs and strays, and forming the nursery of our criminal classes. It will be expensive, and in some some points difficult, to lay hold of these children, and to settle how they shall be fed and clothed while they are being taught. But the object is so desirable, so free from all drawback, so manifestly expedient in the long run, that there will be no hesitation about it on the part of the public; and when this is the case, the work is half done. The Industrial Schools Act must be worked and perhaps extended; the 'Ragged School' system must be taken up by authority. Something perhaps may be done (as the experiment of the Chichester' shows) to solve by this means the problem of a nursery for our Army and Navy. It is not expense or difficulty of detail which will baffle or even naturally impede such a work as this. The true perplexity lies in dealing with the children who are at work, and whose earnings are, or are supposed to be, necessary for the subsistence of themselves and their parents. No doubt, in the long run, it will be good even for their families to carry them off. Their labour will become more valuable when they are educated, and their withdrawal from the labour market must eventually give more employment to their elders. But in the meanwhile there may be wide-spread hardship, and, unless great prudence be shown, the process will break down, because magistrates will hesitate to convict and imprison defaulters, and public opinion will be apt to rise up against them if they prove to be made of sterner stuff. Much will have to be done by nightschools and variations of the half-time system to meet the needs of other employments, agricultural or commercial, than those in which its present form works so well. Of course, in cases of real poverty, fees must be remitted or paid; and (reverting to a subject already noticed) we would warn the Boards to confine their compulsion within as narrow limits as may be, and leave the widest liberty of choice as to the particular school or kind of school. But whatever may be done, we feel convinced that direct compulsion must be supplemented by indirect. If the Factory and Workshops Acts be made thoroughly effective, and modified with a view to extend as widely as possible the principle of making the employer responsible for seeing that children earning wages from him are either sufficiently instructed already or are attending school, the compulsory powers of the Boards will be in great degree relieved of strain at the only point at which they are in danger of breaking down. And they will be also greatly helped if a little of the task of compulsion be taken off them by forcing the Guardians to carry out those excellent provisions of Evelyn Denison's Act, which make the sending the children of outdoor paupers to school a part of parochial relief. At present this Act, now simply permissive, is disgracefully neglected. neglected. It appeared by a recent return, that out of 38,577 children of outdoor paupers in London, only 3125 were paid for at school by the Guardians. At St. Pancras there are 2136 such children, and not a single one is paid for: in the Strand Union the Guardians actually have the face to answer, 'Nothing known about such an Act.' Evidently such a state of things ought not to be allowed: the Guardians have had a fair trial under a permissive system, and now we hope that the screw will be put on at once. All this belongs to the Home Office; we wish that our experience of its energies were more satisfactory. But Mr. Bruce would find an easier field here, and might actually wipe out the remembrance of his cab legislation and his Licensing Bill. These and other similar precautions must be taken, and the fervour of new-born converts to compulsion must be tempered by the remembrance that it is our last resource-that, like the rod, it may often be most effective by being kept simply in terrorem—that its failure would leave us in a far worse plight than at present, while it is still untried. But it must be attempted; on its success more depends than even on the other points on which we have already dwelt. If we are really discriminating and make allowance for the difficulties which society imposes on the individual, then we may be just and fear not.' The work will succeed, and it will be one which our children and our childrens' children will bless. In these ways we hope that a real improvement may take place in the work of our Elementary Schools; and we look forward, lastly, to another influence acting in the same direction, to stimulate and to test such improvement. The Government inspection must be in some way extended, so as to reach at least all Elementary Schools. Probably almost all the large schools will come into the present system, simply making themselves Public Elementary Schools' in the meaning of the Act. But a beginning has been made, which will hardly be allowed to remain fruitless, towards a larger and more varied system. All the existing schools not already under regular inspection are to be now called upon to submit to be inspected by the Education Department, in order to test their efficiency in teaching, under pain of being ignored in estimating the educational resources of the various localities. We understand that the inspection (as indeed is necessary) is to be conducted by rather freer and less technical methods than usual, looking to tolerable efficiency of any kind, rather than to efficiency after a particular type and pattern. We cannot but hope that the experiment will not be altogether dropped, when it has done its immediate duty. The The Public Elementary Schools' will be our regular forces, and we care not how strictly they are drilled and disciplined: but there may well be an outside fringe of valuable but irregular combatants against ignorance, who may be all the more useful for being somewhat more loosely ordered. So, we think, shall we best secure that general inspection, without which no regurity and universality of educational work can be for any length of time ensured. These are some of the directions in which, confidently, almost certainly, we expect to see true progress. But independently of these special forces and modes of action, we rely on the great and thorough awakening of public interest in education, the evidences of which actually crowd upon our view. Nothing is more remarkable than the deep interest shown in the School Board elections, and the high class of men who have become candidates and have been elected. That they should have been willing to undertake a task which is full of labour and difficulty, of doubt and responsibility, and which brings with it no compensating advantages of remuneration and position, shows at once the amount of interest felt, and the strong public spirit, which is ready, now 'as always, for public duty. That they should have been so generally elected, that the ratepayers should have chosen men who put education first and economy second, and who desire to do their work in a liberal and uncompromising spirit, is a proof that the country at large is leavened with that same interest in the subject which hitherto has been confined to certain classes. The proceedings of the Boards themselves have shown a desire, not only to make Elementary Education thorough, but to remember that National Education must be looked upon as a whole, and that no system is good which does not weld together the various classes of schools, and therefore the various classes of the community, so that not only shall a good average of knowledge be obtainable by all, but there shall be, for those who are capable of higher things, a means of climbing the ladder, which has (to use a phrase now famous) its foot in the gutter and its top in the University.' In all these things we rejoice: they may last in full vigour only for a time, but in that time they will give an impulse which will never be lost. If a reactionary feeling should come over us, and a stationary period succeed the present, still a vastly higher level will have been reached, and in these matters there can be no steps backward. It is not (as we have said) on mere legal obligation or a sense of expediency that we rely. Fill our schools that you may empty our workhouses and our gaols,' is a good common-sense cry, cry, but such cries never reach the depths: they may support, but cannot create enthusiasm. The intellectual zeal for the discovery and the spread of truth, the sense of our moral duty to our fellow citizens and of the need of morality for their own culture and happiness, the warm spirit of sympathy which shrinks from seeing the misery of ignorance in others, as it would from the misery of poverty and starvation-all these elements must act upon the spirit of the nation, to make it rise to its high duty. And we are stating no matter of theory, but a matter of sober historical fact, when we say that hitherto in the annals of the world no movement has united and harmonized these various elements in its service, unless it has been able to invoke the spirit of religious belief and religious enthusiasm, and to regard not only a citizenship of this world, but also 'a citizenship in heaven.' 6 NOTE TO THE ARTICLE on The Chronology of the Gospels,' in No. 260, p. 507. The name of one of the Governors of Syria, Volusius Saturninus, has been inadvertently omitted. It should stand thus on the list: |