23 APRIL 1870, Page 3

An important meeting of delegates from different Trades was held

in Manchester on Wednesday to consider the Education Bill. The delegates were unanimous in favour of compulsion on parents and of free admission,—the remission of school fees being " invi- dious "; but there was a severe debate on the religious question. Nobody argued in favour of religious teaching, though one or two were in favour of instruction in " holiness"; but a considerable &number desired the absurd compromise by which the Bible is to be admitted, but religion excluded. Even this, however, was too much 'for the majority of the delegates, one of whom, Mr. Taggart, of the Carpenters' and Joiners' Society, said he objected" to theology ,even in homeeopathic doses." Another expressed with forcible -frankness the true feeling of English secularism. He had been brought up in a school where the Bible was used as a class-book, -and had learned the 119th Psalm by heart, "and if instead of . the psalm he had learned the 47 problems of the first book of Euclid, he should have been better off than he now was." linally, the delegates agreed by 31 to 21 to substitute " secular " ior " unsectarian," the resolution then running that "the teaching in schools supported by rates and taxes must be secular,"—which is, at all events, honest and intelligible.