17 JULY 1897, Page 10

COUNTY v. DIOCESE.

IN the debate which arose out of Lord Wantage's question in the Lords on Monday the heat evolved was out of all proportion to the importance of the issue directly raised. We say "directly raised," because it was plain in almost every speech that the old and great con- troversy of denominationalism and undenominationalism was always round the corner. It was this that gave the sting to the speeches of Lord Heneage and Lord Kimberley, this that was raised of set purpose by the Archbishop of Canterbury, this that was characteristically suppressed by the Duke of Devonshire. But for this, indeed, the debate must have died out after, at most, the speech of the Bishop of Oxford. It is impossible for one who is not a large landowner, and difficult, we should have thought, even for one who is, to grow excited over the relative merits of the diocese and the county as the area to be chosen for Associations of voluntary schools. It is to be expected, perhaps, in an educational debate that the one purpose for which these Associations are formed should be scarcely so much as mentioned. It only needed that it should be mentioned to reduce the issue to its original minute dimensions, and thereby to deprive it of almost all its interest. The object of the recent Act was to give an additional 5s. a head to voluntary schools, but to give it in such a way that the larger part of the grant should fall to the share of the more necessitous among them. A necessitous voluntary school is a school in which the subscriptions are not enough to meet the balance of expen- diture over income which remains after the Parliamentary grant has been accounted for. In a large number of schools the subscriptions are quite enough to do this ; consequently there is no occasion for them to draw any part of the extra 5s. But how was it to be ascertained which these fortunate schools are? The Education Department protested that it had no time to make the indispensable inquiries, and that, even if it had the time, it would be inexpedient to entrust such a delicate com- parison to inspectors whose entire impartiality as between one school and another must be carefully guarded against suspicion. Accordingly, the Government determined to throw the duty upon the voluntary schools themselves. They were directed to form themselves into Associations, each covering an area large enough to contain schools of all degrees of wealth, and to arrange the schools they represented in the order of their poverty.. When this has been done, the Department will have the material it needs for deciding which schools shall have less than 5s. per child, and which schools shall have more than 5s. per child. The Act says that the total grant shall not exceed that sum ; the Department says that the poorest schools shall receive most; the Associations say which the poorest schools are.

But though the Act provides for the formation of Associations of schools, it says nothing as to the number of schools that an Association is to contain. The Educa- tion Department, indeed, must be satisfied that the Associations are large enough to be really representative, but even the Department has not specified any particular area as that which an Association must necessarily embrace. It is this omission, if omission it can be called, that brought Lord Wantage into the field on Monday. He appeared, he said, to protest against " a considerable area of the country known as the county of Berks being compelled to do that which they had no desire to do, and which they had taken every possible means in their power to avoid doing." The history of this alleged act of tyranny hardly bears out Lord Wantage's description. What happened was that the managers of the voluntary schools in the county of Berks were called upon to elect, and did elect, representatives to determine what should be the area covered by the Association. At this stage of the proceedings it is asserted by Lord Wantage, who wished the county to be the unit, and admitted by the Bishop of Oxford, who wished the diocese to be the unit, that the opinion of the school managers was in favour of the county. But the elected representatives did what elected repre-

sentatives are ordinarily held bound to do,—they examined the question for themselves. This, indeed, is the gist of Lord Wantage's complaint. He does not deny that out of eighteen Berkshire representatives seventeen attended, and that out of these seventeen all but four voted in favour of the diocesan area. His contention is that these thirteen representatives had no business to vote as they did. They were elected to support the county area, and they were acting ultra wires when they presumed to go into the comparative merits of the two areas, and ulti- mately to vote for the diocese. They were the delegates of the managers, and a delegate has no right to a mind of his own. The Bishop of Oxford replied, in effect, that they were not delegates hut representatives,—that they received, " as he understood and as they understood, not merely authority to vote for a county area, but to repre- sent the interests of their schools." Perhaps if they could have been sufficiently protected against arguments from without, Lord Wantage would not have objected to this definition of their function. Had the delegates been locked in and no communication with the outside world permitted, he might even have allowed them to please themselves with the idea that they were representatives and not delegates. Unfortunately these precautions were altogether neglected. Men who should have stopped their ears like so many adders did not refuse to hear the voice of the charmer, and the result was that "those who were elected to vote one way were persuaded by the speech of the Primate to vote another way." They listened in an Ecclesiastical matter to the arguments of the Archbishop of Canterbury. A melancholy defection indeed from the ideal of lay churchmanship !

At the bottom of all this there lies, as Lord Wantage believes, the " unnecessary religious zeal of the clergy." In regard to this we may fairly set the Lincolnshire lay- man against the Berkshire layman. Lord Heneage describes the Ecclesiastical position of the Lincolnshire schools in terms which, if they be accurate, sufficiently relieve the clergy from any suspicion of unnecessary, or indeed of necessary, religious zeal. There are, he says, three hundred and ninety "so-called" Church-schools in the county, of which three hundred " are really mixed schools, and for all practical purposes undenominational schools, managed by committees on which all denomina- tions are represented." The religious question, it seems, has been " settled amicably to keep out Board-schools." In other words, it has been settled in a way which changes it from a religious question into a financial question. The object of the managers of these " so-called " Church- schools is not to teach the religion in which they have a " so-called" faith, but simply to save the parish the cost of a School Board. If this be a true description of religious education " so-called "—we thank thee, Lord Heneage, for teaching us that word—in Lincolnshire, we can only say that the supporters of voluntary schools have not been honest, either with the Government or with the public. We should never have defended the Voluntary Schools Bill if it had been stated in the first instance that the object of passing it was not to secure to parents with definite religious convictions the opportunity of having their religion taught to their children, but merely to save the expense of a School Board. If any one will be at the pains of looking back to the debates on the Bill he will see that the most effective speeches on its behalf were one and all based on the assumption that voluntary schools meant denominational schools, and that denominational schools meant schools in which the characteristic doctrines of a particular denomination are taught. To preserve these schools and this teaching the taxpayer was asked to put his hand a little deeper into his pocket, and to find 5s. more for every child in voluntary schools rather than allow these schools to be closed and the parental conscience to be violated. Had the Bill been given its real title, and headed " A Bill to make it easier to keep out School Boards from parishes not already provided with them," it might have been very much harder to carry it though the House of Commons. Speaking for ourselves, we should have viewed its defeat with indifference, and so, we suspect, would many of those who were most urgent in pressing it forward. Why should we taxpayers add to a burden already quite heavy enough in order to spare the ratepayers of three hundred Lincolnshire parishes the infliction of a school rate ? That is a question to which the friends of " so-called " denominational schools may have to find an answer sooner than they think.