Lord Aberdare made a good speech also on New Year's
Day, at or near Cardiff, on occasion of the opening of some new Board Schools in the Gellygaer School Board district. He pointed out how impossible it was for any fifteen men, Cabinet Ministersthough they were, to agree on the details of a great measure like the Education Act, without a vast deal of mutual concession ; and that if it had pleased one section, either of the Cabinet or the people, more than the existing Act does, it must have pleased another (and we may add, probably a much more numerous) section less,—a consideration to which the extreme Liberals seem, oddly enough, quite indifferent. But what was remarkable in Lord Aberdare's speech, was the assumption which runs through it that unsec- tarian religious teaching in the Board Schools is not only easy, but popular in nonconformist Wales, and that the secular system would be quite the reverse. If that be true, the Birmingham League's prospects of converting the whole United Kingdom are somewhat shady.
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