State had no right to assist popular education was theoretically false and practically mischievous. It was a departure from the previous faith of Nonconformists. Just now, it may be worth while to recall the history of this controversy.

The first parliamentary grant in aid of education was made in 1833, and it was administered by two Lords of the Treasury; the whole amount--£20,000-was divided between the National Society and the British and Foreign School Society. The grant was made for six successive years, and, so far as we know, without any protest from the Nonconformists of those days. In 1839, Lord Melbourne's Government proposed to increase the grant to £30,000, in order to provide funds for the establishment of a normal school for teachers, in which the Bible should be read every day, but in which all special religious instruction should be given by various ministers of religion at separate times. At the same time her Majesty, by the advice of the Government, entrusted the administration of future parliamentary grants for educational purposes to a Committee of the Privy Council.

Most of our readers remember how, in 1846, the Nonconformists denounced the Committee of Privy Council as an unconstitutional body, and maintained that its action was all directed to increase the influence of the Established Church; and no doubt there are very many persons who believe that it is to the Established Church that we owe the origination of the educational system, which, with all its faults and deficiencies, has been productive of such immense advantage to the nation. This, however, is a mistake. The weapons-nearly all of them -which were used with so much energy, though with so little effect, by Nonconformists in 1846, were the very weapons which had been used with equal energy and with almost as little success by the clergy themselves seven years before. In 1839, Lord Derby, then Lord Stanley, who led the opposition to the Government measure in the House of Commons, declared that the vast majority of the laity of the Church of England, and almost the incalculable majority of the clergy of that church, as well as of the prelates, with 'hardly an exception-if, indeed, there be one-have expressed, one and all, not their confidence, but their entire and absolute 'dissent from the principles embodied in the formation of the 'Committee.' Mr. Disraeli, in 1839, anticipating our own leaders in 1846, maintained that 'to diminish the duties of the 'citizen is to imperil the rights of the subject;' that those who insisted on State education sanctioned the theory of a 'paternal government;' and that the result of this theory

The Tories and the Clergy the Original Voluntaries. 405

might be seen in the East, in the stagnation of China, and in the West, in the stagnation of Austria-' the China of Europe.' Sound old Tories, like Sir Robert Harry Inglis and Mr. Thomas Dyke Acland, appealing to the statistics which Mr. Baines afterwards worked with so much vigour, declared that the progress of popular education during the present century had been so satisfactory, that new measures were altogether unnecessary. Lord Stanley's great speech was interpreted by Lord Morpeth, who followed him, as going to the extent of sepa'rating and dividing the executive government of 'the country, the responsible ministers of the Crown, from 'all care, all superintendence, all control, over the general 'education of the people:'-a very fair summary of hundreds of speeches which, seven years later, were delivered to audiences of Nonconformists amidst enthusiastic and tumultuous applause. Every epithet of invective and denunciation flung at the Committee of Privy Council in 1846 by our own popular leaders may be found in the speeches of the Conservatives of 1839. Lord Stanley, in his vehement way, declared that the Committee was 'irresponsible, unrepressed, and unfettered by Parliament;' he objected to its 'irresponsible authority, the despotic and unfettered control of the Committee of Privy Council;' its power, he said, could be exercised with impunity.' Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley,

declared that the Committee was 'hostile to the constitution of the country,' 'hostile to the Established Church,' hostile to revealed religion itself.' Education (he maintained) was necessarily and divinely connected with religion, and the Government, in establishing their Committee, were setting divine law at defiance. What God hath joined together,' he exclaimed, 'let no man put asunder.' Lord Francis Egerton thought it was 'an insult, or slight, put upon the Church ;' that not any of its leading members, or any of its most 'distinguished ministers,' could have a seat upon the Committee. The hostility to the Normal College on the part of the clergy and Conservatives throughout the country was so fierce, that Lord John Russell announced to the House, before the great fight in Parliament began, that the Government proposed to abandon that part of their scheme; and Lord Stanley's motion, praying her Majesty to revoke the Order appointing the Educational Committee of the Privy Council, was lost by only five votes, in a House of five hundred and fifty-five. In the House of Lords, under the lead of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops and the Conservative peers opposed the Government plan with equal energy and resoluteness. There

can be little doubt that the Committee would have been at once extinguished, but for the firmness with which the Nonconformists sustained the action of the Liberal Ministry. The fight lasted for many months; and on March 6, 1840, the general body of Dissenting ministers in London and Westminster held a special meeting at the Congregational Library, and passed unanimously the following resolution:

"That the number of petitions presented of late to both Houses of Parliament, declaring the established clergy to be the persons in whom the superintendence of any system of national education should be mainly vested, exhibit an attempt to revive a long obsolete branch of priestly power, betraying a spirit as arrogant as it is unjust, and that should be resisted to the utmost, not only by the Protestant Dissenter, but by every friend to general liberty; that, as a matter of expediency, we should regard the placing of a system of that nature in such hands as tending rather to perpetuate than to remove the popular ignorance, discontent, and irreligion, and as adapted to strengthen every prejudice unfavourable to our intelligence, virtue, and greatness as a people; that, on the ground of justice, we are no less convinced that, if any portion of the public money be granted for such purposes, it should be for the advancement of that secular education, concerning which all are agreed, and not for education in religion, on which we are so much divided, and which, in such cases, will be best provided for in being left to the judgment of persons locally interested in school management; that we accordingly hear, with peculiar satisfaction, the fixed resolution evinced by her Majesty's ministers to proceed upon these principles in the application of the late grant for this object.'

So far, therefore, from its being true that we owe to the Church of England the establishment of the unconstitutional' body which for the last nine and twenty years has been steadily developing the popular schools of this country, the Church 'to use the emphatic language of Sir J. K. Shuttleworth, whose name was a symbol of horror to the Nonconformists of 1846'assumed the responsibility of resisting by the utmost exercise of her authority and influence in the country, in both Houses of Parliament, and at the foot of the Throne, the first great plan ever proposed by any Government for the education of the humblest classes in Great Britain.' The Independents and Baptists did their best to support it.

The real ground on which the Church of England opposed the establishment of the proposed Normal College, and the institution of the Committee of Privy Council was clear and definite the college was not to be placed under the government of the clergy, many of whom asserted that they were the

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only authorised educators of the English people; and they believed, that to entrust to a committee of laymen the superintendence of a national system of education was to deny to the Church the power she had a right to claim. Lord Francis Egerton, as we have seen, thought that this was 'an insult or slight put upon the Church.' Mr. Acland thought that no lawyer would deny that some general superintendence over ' education does still vest in the heads of the Church, untouched 'by the changes which have taken place with the extension of religious liberty.' These are very mild and modest words, compared with many that might be quoted.

How was it that Nonconformist opinion, which in 1839 was in favour of Parliamentary grants, at any rate for the secular education of the people, and in favour even of grants which assisted denominational schools, underwent so strange a revolution in the course of seven years? The explanation of the change is not very difficult. The Liberals went out of office, and in 1842 Sir James Graham laid before Parliament the Educational Clauses of the Factories' Regulation Bill. As the scheme of Lord Melbourne's Government for establishing a Normal College had been defeated by the resistance of the clergy, Sir James Graham appears to have thought it expedient to conciliate them, and in the original draft of his Bill gave such intolerable power to the Church over the schools he proposed to establish, that Dissenters, from one end of the country to the other, were stung into the fiercest antagonism. The Bill was read a second time in the House of Commons on Friday, March 24th, 1843; on the previous Friday, the Congregational Board met in the Congregational Library, and protested against the educational clauses as 'sectarian and oppressive,' and called upon all the friends of civil and religious liberty to give them their most strenuous opposition.' No more striking illustration of the remarkable progress of liberal principles during the last five and twenty years is possible, than that an English minister should have dared in 1843 to ask the House of Commons to sanction a Bill containing such monstrous proposals as the following, which the Congregational ministers of London mercifully described as 'the more objectionable provisions of the

measure:'

I. The appointment of the clergy and their churchwardens as school trustees.

II. The appointment of four additional trustees by the justices of the division.

III. The appointment of the clerical trustee as the permanent chairman at the meetings of the committee.

IV. The authority given to the clerical trustee to prescribe and regulate the religious instruction of the schools, while even the Government inspector is not allowed to inquire into or report upon that instruction without express permission given by the archbishop of the province or the bishop of the diocese in which the schools may be situated.

'V. The infliction of a penalty on parents for not sending their children to the schools.'

Sir James Graham attempted at first so to modify these extraordinary proposals as to make them less odious, but he altogether failed to avert or to alleviate the indignation they justly provoked, and they had to be withdrawn.

From that time there came to be a strong feeling on the part of Nonconformists that the Government, which they now regarded with deep distrust, would not act fairly in the matter of education. They remembered how Lord Melbourne's proposal to found a Normal College on the principles of religious equality had been defeated by clerical influence. They saw how the same influence had now led Sir James Graham to make an audacious attempt to place the education of factory children wholly in the hands of the Church. They were familiar with the language in which many distinguished clerical orators, and not a few laymen whose zeal was as fiery as that of their clerical leaders, maintained that the clergy of the Established Church were the only authorised teachers of the English people; and, irritated, alarmed, and excited, they rapidly abandoned their old ground, and took up a new, and, as we think, altogether untenable position.

'Against an equal system of national education,' according to the Congregational Magazine of 1843, commenting on Sir James Graham's Bill, it is indeed impossible for intelligent ' and patriotic Nonconformists to oppose themselves, who have 'examined the volume published by authority, "On the Physical ' and Moral Condition of the Young Children employed in 'Mines and Manufactories.'" The Congregational Union, which met in the May of that year, in Crosby Hall, passed strong resolutions against the Bill, but made no protest against the right of the Government to assist in the education of the poor. The great Educational Conference held in London in December of the same year revealed the strength of a new feeling, but indicated that Congregationalists were still very far from the extreme position they assumed in 1846. The Conference was convened to give a stimulus to popular education, and on the morning of the second day it adopted, with one dissentient, the following resolution, which was moved by Algernon