The Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Mackarnesa) made a very inju-
dicious attack, in opening a new voluntary school at Wokingham, on Thursday, on Board-Schools, and Board School management. Popular election, he said, could not produce a Board equal to the task of selecting a master or mistress strictly for fitness. We do not know why. We do know that many School Boards seem to look much more exclusively to this than many clerical managers ; while there are clerical managers who care more for some other quality in the schoolmaster,—the power of organ- playing, for instance, or strict orthodoxy,—than even for powers of teaching. Then the Bishop went on to attack the London School Board for heaping up education rates without showing much result for those rates. He should study Sir Charles Reed's account of the London School Board's achievements, and not hit in the dark. The truth is, that the clerical prejudice against School Boards is a very petty and personal one. The great crime of School Boards, in the secret hearts of clergymen, is not that they do not do their work well, but that they stand between the authority of the clergyman and the parish in which he had been used to reign.
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