LORD SALISBURY'S EDUCATIONAL STATESMANSHIP.
LORD SALISBURY'S remarkable proposal, made on Tuesday at the meeting of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the National Church, to exempt the subscribers to denomina- tional schools from the payment of the Education rate for Board Schools, gives us the measure of his states- manship. Of course, we are well aware that this pro- posal does not originate with Lord Salisbury ; the Roman Catholics, the Wesleyans, and the Churchmen have all of them been urging the acceptance of some principle of this kind for several years back ; but that Lord Salisbury should com- mit himself to its advocacy, is something of an event. It would be hardly more bizarre to propose that persons who subscribe sufficiently to the funds of the Charity Organisa- tion Society should be exempted from poor-rates, than to propose that all who subscribe to voluntary schools should be exempted from the Education rate. Consider only what it would mean if the State once began the practice of letting its citizens choose hqw they would advance any cause which Parliament had decided to be necessary for the benefit of all. It would become impossible to compute, even approxi- mately, what any definite rate or tax would yield, if an in- definite number of exemptions were to be allowed on the score of voluntary contributions to other purposes of the same kind. When you appropriate national resources for any purpose you undertake a great national responsibility ; and it is not surely for statesmen who do this to say that they will allow that responsibility to be discharged by persons who are not really responsible to the State, and who could not even be dismissed by the State. The managers of a voluntary school are not responsible to the State at all. They receive certain grants from the State on condition of complying with specific arrangements, but though the State could withdraw these grants on evidence that the arrangements required had not been made, it could exert no other influence at all over the management of that school, not even so far as to require that the subscribers to the school should be guaranteed the right to control the mode of expending their own subscriptions. It is monstrous to propose that a purpose for which the State imposes a tax, or for which the municipality is required to impose a rate, should be con- sidered as satisfied by what a voluntary body, for which neither the State nor the municipality has any real or effective responsi- bility, may choose to do. It is quite one thing to say that a parent may, if he likes, choose for his child a voluntary school in which the teaching is shown to be tolerably efficient, and quite another to say that, by contributing a certain sum to the ex- penses of that voluntary school, he shall be permitted to evade the education rate for the locality in which he lives. The former concession to parents' preferences on behalf of their children is reasonable enough, because—after certain tests of educational efficiency are satisfied—they are the best judges of the sort of education their children ought to have. But to allow every parent who prefers a Church school, or a Roman Catholic school, or a Wesleyan school for his children, to discharge in full his obligations to the district in which he lives, by contributing to one of these schools, even though the great want of the dis- trict might well be a school managed by much more experienced and efficient managers than any of these denominations could, in that locality, provide, would be really to impose a rate for a necessary and useful purpose, and then allow it to be evaded by paying one for a comparatively superfluous and useless pur- pose ; and any State which would permit this, plays at ducks and drakes with its authority as a State. You cannot impose in the name of the State a duty, of which the State itself does not guarantee the fulfilment. You might, for instance, under such an arrangement as Lord Salisbury proposes, have plenty of childless householders who happened to be, say, Swedenborgians, in a neighbourhood where there were a mere handful of Sweden- borgians, and these might desire to discharge their responsibility by contributing to a Swedenborgian school which was of no use to the locality, and thereby to escape the necessity of con- tributing towards the Board School of the district, which was of great use to the locality. We cannot imagine any proposal more fatal to the authority of a State, than that it should permit its citizens, instead of fulfilling the duties it imposes, to fulfil other alternative duties, the discharge of which it does not really control. If Lord Salisbury or any other states- man imagines that because so many of us prefer de- nominational schools to schools with no distinctive religious teaching, we shall be willing to let citizens decide for themselves how they may choose to fulfil the educational duty which the State imposes on them, they are making the most extraordinary mistake imaginable. We certainly agree with Lord Salisbury, that we should prefer to see children sent to de- nominational schools of equal efficiency, to seeing them sent to Board Schools ; but then the equal efficiency for the purposes of the locality is the condition of the whole matter, and such efficiency is not and cannot be decided by mere Government inspection. We would never consent that Englishmen should be taxed for schools whiph are not controlled, directly or in- directly, by the taxpayers. And we who care for religious schools can surely support these schools in addition to the schools im- posed by the State, at least under the liberal arrangements which the Education Act and the present Education Code provide. To permit ratepayers to discharge themselves from the duty of paying a rate, by a voluntary subscription to a school which is not managed by any public body, though it is inspected by the State, is to weaken so seriously the very principle of State authority, that it must end in the complete breakdown of that authority.
And Lord Salisbury's blunder is not merely a blunder in statesmanship ; it is an extraordinary blunder in party tactics also. Does he not know that the Act of 1870 was a compromise in which the great majority of those who alto- gether object to denominational schools regarded themselves as enduring a terrible defeat I Does he not know that the compromise was at least as favourable to the denomi- national principle as the most sanguine of the religious party could have expected, and that if the whole controversy were to be reopened, and reopened on such an issue as he has proposed, there would be hardly any chance of obtaining so favourable a compromise again B Is he not satisfied with having fifty per cent. more children in the National Schools than are to be found in all the Board Schools put together Can he even conceive a complete revolution in the system of education which would turn out more satisfactorily for the religious principle than that? It seems to us that the Wesleyans and Catholics and Churchmen who imagine that by crying fora system more favour- able to religious education than they already have, they shall get it, must surely think that by crying for the moon they will get that also. It is perfectly true, of course, that, on the whole, religions education is preferred to a bare secular educa- tion in England ; but then the people of England think that they get under the School Boards a sufficiently religious education for their children ; and though they may be mis- taken, they will certainly be very often found to prefer a rather indifferent religious education, managed by Boards whom they themselves choose, to a considerably better religious education managed by committees over whom they have no control. Re- open the whole question on the basis which Lord Salisbury proposes, and you are very much more likely to have the Denominational Schools swept away, and Board Schools uni- versally substituted, than you are to get the change which Lord Salisbury proposes,—namely, that ratepayers shall be allowed to choose to what school they will pay their rates, even though it be not a school which the neighbourhood in which they live desires to encourage. Lord Salisbury has made a double blunder. As a statesman, he has given his sanction to a principle which strikes at the root of State authority. As a party leader, he has shown that he does not know when he is well off, but is inclined to reopen questions the only result of reopening which must be to lead to a settlement far less favourable to his own wishes than the settlement under which we live. He neither knows how to foster reverence for the State—a principle which is at the root of all wise Conservatism ; nor how to let well alone, a principle which is at the root of all successful strategy.
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