The deputation on Wednesday to the Prime Minister and the
Duke of Devonshire as President of the Council, on the subject of help to voluntary schools, was a very strong and very impressive one. The Archbishop of Canterbury put the case for more aid to the voluntary schools very clearly, and the Bishop of London made it much stronger by bringing home to the two Ministers' minds the real crux of the situa- tion. It is this, that the Roman Catholic and Church schools, having to compete with the unlimited resources of the rate- supported Board-schools, find themselves deprived of all their most efficient assistant teachers by the Board-schools, while this again draws to the Board-schools all those keener pupils who are on the look-out for scholarships to take them to the secondary schools. In this way, if nothing is done to save those schools in which religions teaching is- regarded as a matter of first-rate importance, the voluntary schools will soon be more or less emptied of their children, and definite religious teaching will die out of English elementary education. The Duke of Devonshire, as head of the Education Department, pointed out the difficulty of greatly increasing the fixed grant per head, whether the school really wanted it or not, but made no objec- tion at all to relieving the school-buildings of all rates, nor to abolishing the 17s. 6d. limit, but he remarked that to allow the education rate of a School Board to be revised by a local authority, though it might do fairly well where the local authority was a County Council, would not be tolerated by School Boards, if the Town Council, not generally a highly
educated body, were to revise the rates in towns. Lord Salisbury spoke with very warm sympathy of the claim of the religious schools to be aided against the limitless com- petition of rate-aided schools, but advised patience, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer might not be able to afford help enough to do, in a single year, what is most needful. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was spoken of as "the lion in the path." But Lord Salisbury will prove a very effective lion-tamer to so very well-mannered a lion.
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