Mr. Herbert Fisher's remarkable maiden speech last week opened, we
hope and trust, a new and fruitful epoch in the history et our schools. The Minister of Education fulfilled all the expectations that had been formed when his appointment astonished and de- lighted the country. He went to the root of the matter at once, telling the House of Commons that we must spend more on educa- tion, and that we must first of all spend more on the teachers. It was true that the schools of England and Wales cost in all about 240,000,000 a year—" eight times the value of our annual im- portation of oranges and bananas," and "almost one-fourth the value of the annual expenditure on alcohol." But we must ask not only whether we can afford to spend the money, but whether we can afford not to spend the money, and the supplementary question is the more important. The new Armies could not have been raised so quickly but for the good material available from the public elementary schools. The commander of a cruiser flotilla, manned with scratch crews, wrote to a school inspector : "The way these fellows picked up the job seemed to me perfectly mar- vellous. There is something in your damned Board-school educa- tion after all."
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