the Upper Chamber was dexterously carried into effect by a method for which its consent was not needed'.

The Queen published an Order in Council appointing a Special Committee of the Privy Council to administer the money voted by the Commons. The Lord President of the Council, Lord Lansdowne, was chairman, and the other members were the Lord Privy Seal, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary, and the Master of the Mint.

It is perhaps worth quoting part of the letter from Lord. John Russell to Lord Lansdowne, requesting him to act on this Committee 'for the consideration of all matters affecting the education of the people,' as this clearly expresses the views with which the Committee was formed and the needs which it was intended to supply.

'MY LORD,

'Whitehall, Feb. 4, 1839.

'I have received Her Majesty's Commands to make a communication to your Lordship on a subject of the greatest importance. Her Majesty has observed with deep concern the want of instruction which is still observable among the poorer classes of Her subjects. All the inquiries which have been made show a deficiency in the general Education of the People which is not in accordance with the character of a Civilized and Christian nation.

'The reports of the chaplains of gaols show that to a large number of unfortunate prisoners a knowledge of the fundamental truths of natural and revealed Religion has never been imparted.

'It is some consolation to Her Majesty to perceive that of late years the zeal for popular education has increased, that the Established Church has made great efforts to promote the building of schools, and that the National and the

1 The Upper Chamber, by 229 to 118, presented an address to the Queen, which was practically a protest against the new Committee (Hansard, T. S., xlviii. p. 1255). The Queen replied, 'I cannot help expressing my regret that you should have thought it necessary to take such a step on the present occasion' (ibid. vol. xlix. p. 128).

British and Foreign School Societies have actively endeavoured to stimulate the liberality of the benevolent and enlightened friends of general Education.

'Still much remains to be done; and among the chief defects yet subsisting may be reckoned the insufficient number of qualified schoolmasters, the imperfect mode of teaching which prevails in perhaps the greater number of the schools, the absence of any sufficient inspection of the schools and examination of the nature of the instruction given, the want of a Model School which might serve for the example of those societies and committees which anxiously seek to improve their own methods of teaching, and finally the neglect of this great subject among the enactments of our own voluminous Legislature '.'

The Committee was appointed on April 10, and first met on April 13.

In 1835 a sum of £10,000 had been voted by the House of Commons for the erection of Model Schools, and the creation of a State Training College was the scheme which the Ministry now had most at heart to carry out. It was proposed to divide the religious instruction given in this school into special and general, and to entrust the former, the denominational instruction, to licensed religious ministers belonging to the various communities 2. This arrangement, which had already been carried out at Dublin in a more extreme degree, raised such a storm of indignation that all idea of the school had to be dropped, and the annual vote was only carried in the House of Commons by 275 against 273 votes. It was assumed that the system proposed for the Normal School would be adopted in all schools, and there was a strong opposition to any weakening of denominational instruction 3.

1 P. P., 1839, xli. p. 255. 2 Newcastle Commission Report, vi. 300. 3 The vote this year was taken for Great Britain as in 1833, and became £30,000 by the inclusion of the ten thousand pounds which in 1834 and 1836 and the following years had been voted separately for Scotland (4 & 5 Will. IV, c. 84; 6 & 7 Will. IV, c. 98; 7 Will. IV, c. 79; 1 & 2 Vict. c. 111). Vide p. 132.

However, the money was voted, a permanent staff of officials was appointed1, and Dr. Kay (afterwards Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth), an Assistant Commissioner of Poor Laws, well known for his interest in the education of the poor, was made the secretary of the new Committee. 'A born educator,' Matthew Arnold called him, 'an earnest student of methods and problems of education ?.?

By an early Minute of the Committee (June 3, 1839), the money which had been voted in 1835, and was to have been spent in creating the State School, was directed to be divided equally between the two Societies in order to establish Training Colleges, and it was readily met by corresponding contributions on their part. The Committee decided that the annual Government Grant was still to be spent chiefly in granting aid to the building of school-houses, and only exceptionally of school-houses unconnected with the two Societies. But the continuous right of inspection by Government was to be a condition of assistance to any school, and the principle of requiring a corresponding local contribution in all cases was observed. Later Minutes of the same year laid down that in helping schools other than those connected with the two Societies, two conditions were to be observed-that the Bible at least should be read as part of the regular instruction, and that there should be a conscience clause to the effect that children whose parents objected might be withdrawn from the religious instruction ‘. The Education Establishment was thus fairly instituted,

1 The appointment of the first two Inspectors, Rev. W. Allen and Mr. Tremenheere, was sanctioned Dec. 9, 1839. London Gazette, p. 2608. 2 T. H. Ward's Reign of Queen Victoria, ii. p. 265: Smith, Elder & Co., 1887. The subsequent secretaries have been Mr. (afterwards Lord) Lingen, 1849-69, promoted to be Permanent Secretary to the Treasury; Mr. (afterwards Lord) Sandford, 1870-84, subsequently first Under-Secretary for Scotland; Mr. Cumin, 1884-d. 1890; Sir George Kekewich, 1890.

3 The Minutes of the Committee in chronological order will be found in P. P., 1854-55, vol. xli.

These applied to Church schools, unless recommended by the National Society (Report of Select Committee of House of Commons, 1866, Lingen, Q. 3,461, 3465).

and proceeded to do the best work that lay in its power; but it had to feel its way cautiously, for there was much jealousy between the various religious bodies, and great suspicion of the new creation of the State1.

The opposition of the Established Church to the new Inspectors was settled in 18402 by a concordat by which the Archbishops of Canterbury and York were to approve of the Inspectors appointed to inspect Church schools in their provinces. In practice none but clergymen were appointed for this branch of the work, and no objection was ever raised to any nomination, but the Church attached great importance to the point, and the adhesion of their schools was at that time of the most critical importance to the new scheme.

The British and Foreign School Society received in 18433 a similar privilege as to the approval of the Inspectors examining their schools, and the principle was afterwards extended to other Nonconformists.

In 1843 Sir James Graham introduced a Government Bill for the Regulation of Factories, to which he had tacked on a number of educational clauses. A distinct preponderance was to be given to the established clergy in the management of the proposed schools for factory children, and the Dissenters were up in arms at once. Their opposition was not to be appeased; it was calculated that twentyfive thousand petitions were presented against the Bill, containing not less than four millions of signatures 5. No concessions were of any avail; the Bill was dropped, and did not reappear as a measure of educational reform.

In 1843 grants in aid were extended to teachers' houses, and to furniture and apparatus for schools; and in the following year the Inspectors were directed to offer to visit and advise schools which had received building grants before 1839, but which the Government had acquired no 1 Taunton Report, Q. 17,429. 2 Minute, August 10. 3 Ibid. Nov. 30, 1843.

+ Life of Lord Shaftesbury, E. Hodder, vol. i. p. 461: London, 1886. 5 F. Adams, The Elementary School Contest, p. 122: London, 1882.

right to inspect. The results of these early inspections showed that the general quality of the education given was almost worthless: even of the children who came to school only one half learned to read at all, and one quarter to write 1. The system of teaching by means of monitors, common to both Lancaster and Bell, stood hopelessly condemned, while it was impossible to expect any general improvement in the schools as long as the mass of teachers was alike incapable and untrained. In 1847 in the House of Commons Macaulay described the schoolmasters of the poor. 'How many of these men are now the refuse of other callings-discarded servants or ruined tradesmen ; who cannot do a sum of three; who would not be able to write a common letter; who do not know whether the earth is a cube or a sphere, and cannot tell whether Jerusalem is in Asia or America; whom no gentleman would trust with the key of his cellar, and no tradesman would send of a message.' As for the dames, let one who was quoted the same evening speak for herself. 'It's little they pays us,

and it's little we teaches them ".'

Progress, however, was being made, and on sure ground. The grant of £10,000 for Normal Schools to the Societies had resulted in the opening of St. Mark's Training College at Chelsea in connexion with the National Society in 1841, and of the new buildings of the British and Foreign School Society in the Borough Road in 1842. Messrs. Kay and Tufnell had been experimenting, largely at their own expense, with the school at Battersea ", which was handed over

1 In the Midlands: Sir Henry Craik, The State in its relation to Education, p. 32; Sir J. Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods, 1862, p. 473. 2 Horace Mann, of Boston, wrote after his visit to England in 1844 (where he had seen on one occasion a thousand pupils in one Lancasterian schoolroom): 'One must rise to some comprehension of the vast import and significance of the phrase "to educate before he can regard with a sufficiently energetic contempt that boast of Dr. Bell, "Give me twenty-four pupils to-day, and I will give you twenty-four teachers to-morrow (Report of an Educational Tour, p. 58: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1846).

3 Hansard, T. S., xci. pp. 1016, 1060. + Newcastle Report, i. p. 111. Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods of Public Education, p. 293.