The meeting of the friends and supporters of the National .
Pub-, lie School Association, which assembled this week in the Poultry, can be regarded in no other light than that of an advertise- ment that the Association still exists. The speakers contented themselves with enforcing the importance of its object, biit did not announce any immediate plan of action. The second or supple- mentary association for promoting local education, which like this • one originated at Manchester, gives no signs of life.; it is shrewdly suspected that the officious aid of Sir Kaye Shuttlevrorth cut the slender thread of its existence. The Miscellaneous Estimates will of course contain a vote to defray. the expenses of the Educational Committee of the Privy Council—all that is likely to ,be heard of it in Parliament. Thus disappears the confident hope entertained in various quarters of an educiktionel m'ovement in the present session. Yet 'there are considerations which suggest that it would have been better for Government to leave the question of national education untouched, than, having begun to proniote it, to pause in mid-career, as it now seems ditiposed to do. We lately ad- verted to the number of teachers with superior qualifications who havebeen trainedunder Government auspices: the number is increas- ing at the rate of a thousand every year; and Government, under the existing arrangements, has no means of providing for them after their training has been completed. An intelligent and in- structed class is thus called into existence, for which no effort- is made to find a legitimate field of action. The experience of other countries has taught us, that the existence of a class iio cir- cumstanced is always pregnant with d'ano-er to social order. When_ conscious intellect finds no place 'for exerbting itself in' established institutions, it soon sets itself to assail them.
