THE OMEN OF THE EDUCATION BILL. T HE passing of the
Education Bill through all its stages without amendment is to our mind still more interesting as an omen of the future than even as a political event of the past. There can be no doubt that while the House of Commons is claiming to be the centre of all power in the country,—and in a very real sense, as it determines the actual character of the Government of the day, is that centre,—it has neverthless for many years back been losing in popularity on account of the length and dreariness, and not nnfrequently the triviality, and even the insincerity, of its discus- sions. It has discussed for the purpose of arresting action, instead of for the purpose of determining what action it should take. And that is a mode of discussing which the country sees through and wearies of. We do not throw the blame of this exclusively on any one party. We should not say that the Gladstonians are more re- sponsible for it than the Unionists, though we might truly say that the Irish Home-rulers have been more responsible for it than either of the other parties, and not unnaturally. They have not only no particular abjection to becloud the reputation of the House of Commons, they have even a certain vindictive satis- faction in achieving that result. To their mind the English House of Commons has eclipsed that imaginary glory with which they always have encircled the name of old Ireland, and to revenge themselves on the House of Commons by reducing its debates to cavils and its European reputation to a shadow, has seemed to them a task of patriotic piety. From the time when the late Mr. Biggar, acting on the hints of Mr. Parnell, used to exhaust the House with long and dismal extracts from irrelevant Blue-books, debate in the House of Commons has steadily tended to diverge from anything approaching statesmanlike deliberation, and has approximated to the captious criticism of bores. The House has itself felt this keenly, and has restlessly endeavoured to save itself from its growing unpopularity as a Senate by all the expedients in the effective use of the Closure that it could devise ; but such expedients, though they may answer a temporary purpose, are almost necessarily ineffectual for the ultimate end of keeping discussion pointed and interesting. When you have a considerable number of persons always on the watch to use "words, words, words," not for the purpose of throwing light on the subject before the mind of the House, but for the purpose of confusing and paralysing the mind, of the House, it becomes almost impossible even. for the ablest men to forget the oppressive conditions under which they are labouring. Very few people can talk brilliantly and lucidly in the presence of _bores, especially if those bores be deliberate instead of deliberative bores. Oratory, persuasiveness, wisdom retreat, as the flood of muddy talk swells and rises. An Assembly that is no longer able to count on the wish of all its members to hear the speakers who will enlighten it, and to discourage those who will spread a sort of mental fog all over it, has lost all the elements of distinction. And that is the fate which for the last seventeen years at least has been slowly descending on the House of Commons. It.is no longer one of the greatest of deliberative Assem- blies. It has still, no doubt, a great wealth of shrewdness and common-sense, but it has lost a great deal of its former pride in its own power, of its instinct of self- respect, of its singleness of aim, of its impatience of un- worthy distractions. And the consequence is that the country, though it sees no sort of substitute for it, and very wisely still trusts it to indicate the Government which best expresses the will of the country, nevertheless is delighted to find the curb on its lueubrations applied with more and more stringency, and sympathises very little with those pathetic lamentations occasionally poured forth over the diminished freedom of the House, and the dicta- tion which it fretfully obeys.
The new Education Bill, drafted with special reference to the collapse of last Session's Bill and to the causes which brought about that collapse, is, as we believe, an omen of what we are to look for. Mr. Balfour, whatever may be said in dispraise of him, is not a man who fails to discern the signs of the times. Like all considerable statesmen, he learns more by his failures than by his successes. He is very sanguine up to a point, the point at which he thinks that his patience and moderation may accomplish what a dictatorial attitude and anything like the appear- ance of resentment will fail to effect ; but when he has tried patience and moderation in vain, he does not shrink from altering his tactics. He was recommended to try a short and simple measure, and a short and simple measure he has not only tried, but in the most methodical way imposed on the House of Commons. He has not in the least concealed from the House that to a large extent what he was asking for was not only short and simple, but tentative and very far from explicit. The House last year rendered it clear enough that a large legislative reform based on exact provisions would involve far too many points of resistance to carry it in any time at the disposal of the House of Commons, so this year he introduced instead not only a short measure but a confessedly vague measure, in which power was taken by the Education Department to leave a great deal to ex- periment without tying its hands too tightly as to the lines on which the experiments were to proceed. Mr. Balfour made no disguise about this in the House of Commons, indeed he insisted on it with a good deal of emphasis, and he completely carried his point. The Education Bill, which will shortly become law, is less an explicit statute than an opportunity for finding out what, if you want an explicit statute, that explicit statute ought to be. It is therefore, more or less, an opening for administrative research. With a good Department to conduct that research,—a Department on which so many eulogies were passed last Session by an Opposition which little thought to what use their eulogies would be put,—there seems to be every hope that the measure will shape itself successfully in the hands of the Education Department. The speech of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the House of Lords gives us great hopes of this, for in his first diocese, the diocese of Exeter, there has been already plenty of preliminary organisation in com- bining the managing boards of voluntary schools into the sort of Association for which the new Education Bill provides. But however this may be, what is of the highest importance is this,—that Mr. Balfour has suc- ceeded in moulding a measure which does not tie down the development of voluntary schools to any very fixed plan, but leaves a good. deal of discretion to the Educa- tion Department as to what that plan may be made under the guidance of their future experience. And after devising this short and also elastic measure, Mr. Balfour steadily pushed it through the House, allowing a good deal of discussion on every important point, but yield- ing nothing to cavil, and steadily resisting all attempts to destroy the flexibility of his proposals, till at last it reached the House of Lords without a single amend- ment. We may depend upon it that this is a precedent which is certain to have great results. The country is sick of all this verbiage of the House of Commons. It is eager to see some end to it. Here we have a prospect of such an end. All strong Cabinets will take this hint. They will devise short measures with a good deal that is elastic in them, which will be trusted to the development of tried and skilled Departments of the State, and these short and elastic measures will be passed virtually by the power of the Cabinet through the House of Commons, while their ultimate shaping will be left to the sagacity and dis- cretion of some permanent body which has already gained the confidence of the country so far as its policy is endorsed by the approbation of the Cabinet of the day. We fully expect that by some method of this kind we shall have in the future elastic measures practically determined more by the Cabinet than by the House of Commons, but decided upon with the advice of one of the great permanent Departments to which the ultimate shaping of the discretionary elements in these measures will be confided. The weak point of these tactics is that with a House of Lords definitely Conservative, Cabinets of the progressive party will not have fair play. That we have often admitted, and we have always said that this blot calls for a remedy. And it will get a remedy so soon as the country really desires some progressive measure to which the House of Lords refuses its assent. Just at present, however, the Radical party has proved itself so unreasonable, and so wholly out of sympathy with the feelings of the democracy itself, that we shall probably have to wait for the remedy till Radicals give up flirta- tions with Irish Home-rule, and organised attacks on the Established Churches of England and Scotland.
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