The Education Bill has been read a second time in
the Lords, amid a unanimous expression of approval, the only point strongly reserved being the election of School Boards by ballot. Lord Shaftesbury, whose opinion was by far the moat important, hoped little from the Bill—apparently on the old ground that God has no need of human knowledge—but considered it nevertheless an admirable one, denied from his immense experience-the existence of any religious difficulty, and brought forward some new and most valuable facts with respect to compulsion. He main- tained compulsion to be impossible, the class you wish to compel being, in fact, nomadic. Of the 40,000 children on the books of the Ragged Schools, not 2 per cent. attend or can attend for an entire year, and there are 60,000 persons wandering "like Scythiane " round London who do not remain six months in any one place. He believed the only effective method of compul- sion would be to take all the Arab children in England, say 400,000, feed, clothe, and teach them—a thought which opens up magnificent vistas of possibility, but is not, we fear, very practical.
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