The speeches of the week have been chiefly on education,
Mr. Stansfeld and Mr. E. A. Leatham having spoken on it at Dewsbury, with an evident bias towards compulsory education ; Mr. Austin Bruce, at Halifax, having advocated his own purely permissive scheme ; and Mr. Charles Buxton having protested strongly against the leap to compulsory education. Mr. Buxton appears to think that compulsion implies a total break with the educational system actually at work, and the introduction of a "more despotic, drastic, and seemingly therefore potent system." We do not see any need for a break with the past. Mr. Lowe's suggestion of compelling a parish in need of new schools to rate itself was expressly adapted to develop, not to supersede, the present system ; and as to the despotism of not allowing parents to leave their children in ignorance, it is as M. Rouher with much less truth said of the French intervention in Italy, "an interven- tion directed against an odious intervention, and intended to arrest it." What intervention is so despotic as the parental intervention, which mortgages all the prospects of children's lives, in order to raise an additional shilling or two a week?
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