We publish elsewhere an interesting and important, though very one-sided
letter from Birmingham, by the Rev. J. Jenkyn Brown, on the operations of the Endowed Schools' Commission, in which he gives statistics of the proportional number of Nonconformists in the new governing bodies of the schemes already passed. We suspect those schemes must be very fax from typical of the whole, as it seems to be admitted that on one governing body alone, and that of a denominationally Church school,—Bridgewater,—there are no less than six Nonconformists out of but 15 governors, that is, two- fifths of the whole, while Mr. Brown's statistics show only nine Nonconformists among 71 governors, i. e., not quite one-eighth. But after all, we do not suppose that the Commissioners themselves really knew who were Nonconformists and who were not, on the new governing bodies,—a matter which it was hardly their .first duty at all events to ascertain, though the Birmingham League has apparently been ferreting out the facts. What we should like to know is, if these schemes, which appear to be, and may really be, for anything we know, so unjust to Nonconformists, have excited local discontent, —whether the feeling is prevalent in the localities them- selves that the educated Nonconformists have been left out in the cold, and not given their due influence on the new governing bodies. There Was no duty in the matter to the Birmingham League, or even to Nonconformity in general, but no doubt there would be a real duty to the Nonconformists of the special localities.
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