THE DEBATE ON ASSISTANCE TO BOARD-SCHOOLS. ANT E have noticed repeatedly
of late the astounding increase in the passion for public expenditure which seems to mark all modern free States, but we hardly expected such an illustration of it as was afforded by the debate in the Commons on Monday. The old way when people cared about their taxes was for the Govern- ment to propose an outlay, which the representatives first refused, and then cut down to more reasonable propor- tions ; but the new way is for Government to suggest a sum, and for the representatives to declare that the Government is decidedly stingy, and ought to ask for a great deal more. The Cabinet, for example, stands pledged to increase the State allowance to necessitous School Boards, and on Monday Sir John Gorst, as representative of the Department, fulfilled the pledge, asking permission to introduce a Bill which increases the grant to those schools by £110,000 a year. The money is to be dis- tributed on a sliding-scale, not yet clear, the object of which is solely that relief should be proportioned to necessity, or if that phrase is more acceptable, to the weight with which the School Board expenditure presses on the district benefited. As the Government takes its statistics from the Department, and as the Department is very glad to be rid of complaints, and has besides the usual professional pride in getting good work done, we may be fairly certain that the grant is enough to meet any immediate necessity, which is all that it is wise for any Government with a controlling House of Commons to attempt. It can so easily do more if the electors insist that more is required. To do more without such in- sistence would have been to relieve the ratepayers too much, the very principle of the Education system being that the ratepayers who elect the School Boards, and therefore control public education, shall feel directly the expenditure, which otherwise they would speedily render almost unen- durable to the Treasury. Instantly, however, the Opposition was in arms, denouncing the Government for its frugality, zLnd asst rting that the grant ought to be five times as much, not because the money was indispensable, but because the voluntary schools, which are voluntarily supported by a class, to the immense relief of the Ex- chequer, had received more. And we do not doubt that all over the country there will be a large party, greatly favoured by that new and tremendous force in politics, the School Board teachers, which will denounce the Unionist Government as " mean " because, while keeping its pledges, it has endeavoured up to the extent of its power to limit the pressure upon taxpayers' pockets. There is really no other charge against it, for the notion that the Cabinet desires to keep Board-schools poor in order that voluntary schools may prosper is not only un- fair, but absolutely childish. Grave men, immersed in affairs and anxious at once about the prosperity of the country and their own careers, do not indulge in those petty spites, especially when they know that it is rates, not taxes, which influence the masses of electors, and that they have to struggle with the illusion, which even seemed to affect the leaders of the Opposition on Monday, that the Treasury is a sort of mine from which with a little extra exertion you can dig any amount of gold that may be required either for the relief of the people or to meet the increasing costliness of civilisation. The victims of that illusion are actually willing to run the risk of killing the voluntary schools, and so more than doubling the cost of national education, and would, by their own ;bowing, have been delighted if the Government, though it thinks £110,000 a year enough, and can if it proves too little double the amount, had asked at once and peremptorily for £600,000. They never think that every pound sent to the Treasury is a pound withdrawn from the industrial enterprise which alone keeps the nation—a nation which cultivates its soil probably at a loss, certainly at exces- sively low interest—in its continuous prosperity. The end being education is a good one, and that postulate granted, no Radical so much as reflects that good ends and thrifty expenditure are not naturally incompatible, or that mere outlay will not of itself suffice to cultivate a people. The demand is always for more buildings, better buildings, a broader curriculum, higher salaries for teachers, till people forget that all these things are instruments, that the true object is a cultivated people, and that it is by no means certain that penuriousness in expenditure does not help to make education efficient. Our people are not educated up to the Scotch level yet, and what did the Scotch system originally cost, or where in Europe is the proportion of the cultivated higher than in Scotland, where still, in the Universities at all events, expense is the one thing deprecated and avoided ? You might grant ten guineas a head to a school, and then, if
ti
the er and the inspector were both incompetent, it wean Je a bad school.
We confess we look upon the present tendency to extravagance in every direction with a feeling of dis. may, with a doubt whether the community, suddenly enriched, as it has undoubtedly been under the Queen's reign, has not lost its sense of proportion, as a man often loses it when he comes into an unexpected fortune. We do not mean that the amounts frighten us. Lord Randolph Churchill's dread of " hundred million Budgets" seems to us like the rich man's dread of increasing servants' wages, a mere fad arising from a lost sense of proportion. England to-day can pay a hundred millions more easily than England in 1847 could pay sixty. Our fear is caused by the new tone in the public mind, the new carelessness as to what is spent, which savours to us of recklessness. Seven millions for education—what does it matter ? let it become ten, and then increase auto- matically—that is the secret dictum of the cultivated Radicals. Mr. Forster thought the maximum average rate for schooling would be threepence in the pound ; it is already ninepence, and will be a shilling—' And what then ?' ask in practice all who have to vote the supplies. Nobody ever raises the economic question, nobody preaches thrift, nobody—this is strangest of all—ever seeks popularity by advocating a remission of taxes. Even the rather absurd cry of twenty years ago for a " free breakfast-table" has died away into silence, and we pay a war rate of income-tax, and know that it will never be taken off, and are still acquiescent. So decided is the change in popular feeling that we, who still believe in the older economics, feel its effect ourselves. We confess guiltily that we have fought for years for an extra year of compulsory attendance at school, and have never for five minutes considered the really heavy addition this would make to educational expenditure. We are conscious, too, of a new doubt about the incidence of rates. The Spectator has maintained for years that the next feat for a new Mr. Gladstone to per- form must be a thorough Rating Reform ; but we begin to hesitate and falter. If that reform is adopted it must, speaking roughly, take the direction of levying rates in proportion to means, rather than in proportion to rent; but, in view of the new popular sentiment, would that be wise ? It is hard enough to keep down the rates even now ; but if half of them, or two-thirds of them, came out of taxes, could we keep them down at all ? The poor are the voters, and they care nothing about the Treasury ; indeed, know nothing about it, except that when it is in good humour it relieves them of some of the rates. If everything, or nearly everything, in the way of public expenditure came from the Treasury, would there be any limit to waste or, to be less severe in phrase, to reasonable but needless expenditure ? We gravely doubt it. It is actually the fact, which Sir Cornewall Lewis would not have believed, that there are large sections of English parties which seek popularity through increased expenditure, now on the Navy, now on the Army, then on sanitary reforms, again on education, and once more on the inspection of everything that can possibly be inspected, from coal-mines to the egg trade. 'And what harm,' asks some one to whom a million is as meaningless a word as a quintillion is to all but astronomers, if they believe, as most of them do, that they are doing their duty ? ' Just this harm. The population increases fast ; it is entirely de- pendent upon industry for the means of livelihood, and every great reduction of its means increases the number left out of regular employment. The expenditure of a hundred millions upon men whose industry, however valuable or even necessary, is not reproductive, greatly reduces those means, and a general willingness to increase that ex- penditure will reduce it still more, and that with increasing rapidity. Thirty years ago that sentence would have read like a platitude, as perfectly needless for anybody'& guidance as the axiom about taking care of the pence. To-day it is a caution so imperatively needed that it is wise to try to bring it home even to the advocates of popular education, who are trying to foster their great cause by urging Governments to an expenditure which even those Governments consider needless. When the Government urges economy, and the representatives shriek for waste, there is surely danger at hand, as much as there is in a private house when the husband feebly urges care, and the wife every day insists on some fresh " launching-out."
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