12 MAY 1900, Page 15

[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]

SIR,—Lady Warwick's letter puts, as pithily as gracefully, the case against your article on the teachers' claim for reasonably secure tenure of office. All that teachers ask is that the Boards, Committees, and persons that locally administer State subventions to schools shall not dispossess a teacher during good behaviour as a man and efficiency as a schoolmaster, without right of appeal. A member of a School Board or the clerical manager of a denominational school is on this matter a trustee for the State, not lord in his own right. A Board of Guardians cannot dismiss a principal officer without the assent of the Central Authority. Is a voluntary school Committee (most often the mere penumbra of the clergyman), or a parish School Board, likely to be less fallible and more trustworthy than a Board of Guardians? I have known a hundred cases in which the autocracy of the clergyman in the parish has come in conflict with the autocracy of the teacher in the school. I do not claim that the teacher is invariably in the right. But ought there not to be some

method of arbitration F—I am, Sir, &c., J. H. Yox.A.LL. [We cannot publish any more letters on this subject.—En. Spectator.]