THE INTOXICATION OF THE RADICALS. T HE Radicals are a little
"fey." During the whole of the Long Vacation we have carefully noted the signs of the times, and have felt persuaded that they were bent, to some extent perhaps without clearly realising their own half-conscious purpose, on playing the game of last year over again against a Government that was forewarned and forearmed. Mr. Balfour gave them the earliest notice of what he was intending to do. As early as last July, directly he had withdrawn the Education Bill, be declared publicly that he would not again overweight his Education Bill, but would take care to do only one thing at a time, and would begin by dealing with the voluntary schools, and the voluntary schools alone. The promises of last year given spontaneously to the voluntary schools, which had been repeatedly, and no doubt rightly, required by the Education Department to comply with new regulations involving a good deal of expense for which many of them could find no additional resources, were the first obliga- tions which the Government felt it incumbent on them to discharge. And so far as any one could see, Mr. Balfour's very frank and very early announcement of his intention to do one thing at a time, and not overload his next Education Bill, instead of rousing the Opposition to the exuberant wrath which they poured out in Monday's and Tuesday's debates, rather met with their approval. Mr. Asquith, in the speech which he delivered on the second reading of the withdrawn Education Bill, had practically advised that course, as the Solicitor- General showed on Tuesday by quoting from his speech. Mr. Asquith then spoke of the admittedly precarious posi- tion of the voluntary schools, declared that he should not grudge them " some additional and even large provision from public resources to maintain a high standard of education where at present it is unduly low," and suggested that if such a proposal were accompanied by the proper " safeguards " the Opposition would not be inclined to offer any unreasonable kind of re- sistance. Mr. Asquith said nothing about insisting that the poorer School Board schools should be dealt with in the same measure as the voluntary schools, and, indeed, had not at that time, we fancy, even conceived the morbid and rather unworthy suspicions which led Sir Henry Fowler, of all men, to suggest on Tuesday night that there might be this advantage to the Government in separating the Bill for aiding voluntary schools from that for aiding poor School Board schools, that the first could be passed by the House of Lords, while the second might be rejected by that irresponsible assembly. Preternatural suspicions of that kind were not in the air last summer, and indeed we cannot express the amazement with which we read Sir Henry Fowler's remark. Sir Henry Fowler is, as we have observed him, both sagacious and disposed, so far as a temperament of an eager and even passionate warmth permits, to be quite fair to his opponents. That remark was not sagacious, and from any less known orator we should have deemed it spiteful. Nothing could have served the purposes of the Opposition better than such a manoeuvre as Sir Henry Fowler suggested. If the Government had availed themselves of so mean a ruse as that, they would have fallen like a lump of lead or of the basest metal that political scorn could imagine. And indeed we can only suppose that Sir Henry Fowler's unfortunate surmise escaped him half unconsciously in the heat of an orator's peroration, for it was entirely unlike his usual earnest moderation. We should not think of remembering it against him, but it does show to what strange and unreasonable heats this Education controversy has fired the Radicals. As we have said, Mr. Balfour gave the earliest possible notice of his fixed intention to make his next Education measure simple and fragmentary. We imagine that Mr. Asquith's second reading speech of last summer really had a good deal to do with the course he has taken. He is not too proud to accept a hint from an antagonist whom he heartily respects. And in all proba- bility it never occurred to Mr. Balfour that he would find the Front Bench on the Radical side of the House seething thus early in the year with preternatural suspicions. Why they might have known, what the debate of this week has fully demonstrated, that the supporters of the Government would take as much offence at any attempt to cheat the poor School Board schools,—if any such were conceivable,—as the Opposition itself. Nothing could have been less like an attack on such schools than Mr. Balfour's opening speech. He laid as much stress on the respect of the Government for both classes of schools, and their deliberate intention to keep up the balance between them, as any devotee of School Boards could have expected or desired. He made it as clear as anybody could make it, that this Bill was deliberately produced as a fragment because the pro- mises made to voluntary schools were those which needed redeeming first, and also because the very different constitution of the two classes of schools prevented the possibility of dealing with them in the same measure without a complexity of structure which the fate of the Bill of last Session had shown to be undesirable. Yet his speech was scarcely out of his mouth before the hue and cry of " Stop thief " began ; and to his amazement and amusement, as we imagine, Mr. Balfour must have found himself suspected of a swindle of which, if he had contemplated it, he had been simple enough to forewarn his foes seven months ago, at the same time explaining his reasons for the course he was about to pursue.
The Radicals are quite overdoing their case. If ever there was evidence of premature and arrogant triumph it was in the debates of Monday and Tuesday nights. They mustered, however, only 112 and just afterwards 110 votes on the substantial questions before the House on Tuesday night, and could not even obtain more than 142 votes to resist the Closure. We are convinced that in their almost insensate confidence that a Government which has declared repeatedly that it entirely respects and desires to sustain the School Board schools, though it wants to give the voluntary schools a kind of help which will save them from being swamped by competitors with much greater resources at their backs, is really bent not so much upon aiding them as upon strangling their rivals, they are doing their best to turn their little success of last year into a serious reverse. Nothing could illustrate the headi- ness of the Opposition more powerfully than Mr. Asquith's change of tone. We have said how reasonable and moderate was his advice of last summer, on which very probably,—of course we only conjecture,—Mr. Balfour acted in dividing the Education Bills of this year. On Tuesday night his tone was almost violent. He accused the Government of having given a "false and fraudulent" description of the new grant-in-aid of 5s. a head. If it was " false and fraudulent " it was a very wonderful kind of falsehood and fraudulence, as Mr. Balfour had most carefull' explained the secret of its falsehood and fraudulence in his opening speech. What Mr. Balfour said was that a good many of the voluntary schools do not need anything like so much assistance as 5s. a head for each child, and that some of them, as we have carefully explained to our readers, will need no fresh help at all. But others again, especially in the towns, need a good deal more than 5s. a head. What, then,. the Government propose, and have explicitly explained to the country at large that they propose, is to form a fund for assisting the voluntary schools by asking for 5s. a head on all the children in those schools, to be distributed by the Education Department (with the advice and help of the federated schools of the different denominations) to each school that needs help, in proportion to its needs. Mr. Asquith describes this as a false and fraudulent method, —as if falsehood and fraudulence were usually advertised to all the world,—on the ground, as far as we can judge, that the true and honest course would have been to get every voluntary school separately returned for what it needed and the sum-total of all such returns voted, so that one school would have had no vote, a second a vote of ls. a scholar, a third a vote of 2s., and so on, up to perhaps some with a return of 10s. a scholar in the most needy urban districts. Now is it really credible that such a statesman as Mr. Asquith should seriously regard such a cumbersome and laborious plan as this as true and honest, while the approximate and far more manageable plan of the Govern- ment is to be branded as " false and fraudulent " ? Seriously speaking, we could hardly believe our eyes when we read either Sir Henry Fowler's suggestion that the Government might profit by the House of Lords rejecting the Bill to assist poor School Board schools, or Mr. Asquith's speech describing the very frank and explicit explanation of Mr. Balfour as to the way in which they proposed to calculate for about as much money as they needed, and how they proposed to divide it, as " false and fraudulent." Both speeches seemed to us all but incredibly and pre- ternaturally suspicious. When the Frenchmen in Paris at the time of the war of 1870 eried out that everybody was betraying them, they were hardly the victims of a more preternatural suspicion. This Education war is intoxicating the Opposition. Unless they soon come to their senses, they will find out what a strange and fatal blunder they are making.
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