Mr. Asquith made a speech at Walsall on Monday, which
was a sort of full-dress rehearsal, we suppose, of the speech he will deliver in the House of Commons in moving the rejection of the Education Bill. He declared that that Bill will not only disorganise but disembody the Education Department, till it will be the mere ghost of its former self after practically handing over all its functions to the new Education Authority, an assertion which shows with what coloured glasses he has read the clauses of the Education Bill. He asserted that the rich School Boards, which had helped themselves freely out of the rates, ought to receive just as much of the new grant as the poorest voluntary schools which had never had any access to the rating power at all. And he denied with some heat that the Opposition had ever thought of meeting the Bill by a declaratory resolution intended to catch the votes of those who more or less approve some of its provisions, while disapproving it as a whole. We are not at all sorry that the motion for the second reading is to be met by a direct negative. We believe that it will result in showing how miserably weak the Opposition is in the House of Commons, and yet it will prove to be stronger in the House of Commons than it is in the country. The English people as a whole have no sympathy with the view which is the real view of the strongest opponents of the Bill, that those parents who prefer distinctive religions teaching for their children should be drilled, not to say worried, into adopting Undenominationalism against both their oonscience and their will.
Previous page
