Mr. Diggle, the Chairman of the London School Board, delivered
his annual address on Thursday, from which it appears that the new management has decreased the ex- penditure from £1,045,365 to 21,028,883, though the number of children taught had increased by 47,600. More- over, this decrease had been secured in spite of an auto- matic increase of expenditure so great, that Mr. Diggle "has no hesitation in saying that the Board carried on their work in 1888 at the rate of £250,000 a year less than the corre- sponding work cost in 1885." These figures will be contested, but the Board has evidently arrested the tendency to spend. The increased number of scholars, too, is satisfactory, though it should be observed that the non-Board schools are dying away under competition, the number attending those schools having decreased from 182,728 in 1879, to 164,321 ten years later. Mr. Diggle's statement is a valuable one, but its public effect will be nearly lost owing to his having overweighted it with statistical details better suited to the appendix of a report.
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