In a letter to Mr. W. Ansell, a member of
the Birmingham School Board, Mr. Chamberlain expresses his great preference for the new Education Authority as compared with School Boards elected by the cumulative vote; and also for the decen- tralising policy, which will enable local authorities to vary the types of teaching according to the different tastes and in- terests and occupations of different localities. Further, Mr. Chamberlain admits cordially that there are many points deserving careful discussion and perhaps modification, in reference, for instance, to the amount of aid to be given to the poorer School Boards, and the absence of a con- science clause in denominational training-colleges,—points on which in all probability, in our opinion, the Bill will emerge from Committee a good deal altered from the form in which it will go in. It is perfectly ridiculous to state, as we have seen it stated, that this sort of admission on the part of a Minister with respect to the less important clauses of a complicated Bill presented by one of his colleagues, is unprecedented. There is nothing for which there are more abundant precedents. Mr. Chamberlain shows in the same letter that his preference for County and Town Councils as the bodies to which the Education Authority is to owe its origin, is not at all new, but was as strongly felt and as strongly expressed by himself in 1870 as it is now. The School Boards elected by the cumulative vote appear to open the way to distinctly sectarian strife far more effectually than the system which is now proposed. At all events, the London School Board of last year justified distrust of that mode of election far more emphatically than any sort of abstract argument could have done.
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