adopted Mr Chamberlain's policy, including, of course, its salient feature-the general restriction of manufactured imports. But Mr Balfour, speaking in the City, vehemently affirmed that he had not changed his position. And that there were really still wide differences between him and Mr Chamberlain was made clear by something more instructive than any declaration, namely, the evasive tactics adopted to meet Sir J. Kitson's motion. Plainly, if there were real agreement, the wisest course would have been to meet the motion with a simple and unequivocal amendment moved at the outset and debated on its merits. But a wholly different plan was followed. Mr Balfour spoke, not to propound his own policy, but to make verbal criticisms on the motion. A wrangle followed, and the debate turned on anything rather than the merits of Tariff Reform. Eventually, in the last hour of the debate, Mr Wyndham moved the official amendment of the Opposition in a speech admirable in language, but meaning nothing in particular. The amendment itself was equally uninstructive, for its whole significance depended on what was meant by the condemnation of artificial protection against legitimate competition'; and this the mover carefully refrained from explaining. After Mr Wyndham's speech the closure was moved, and the debate came to an ineffective end.

This strange performance was extolled by many persons as a triumph of Opposition tactics. And so perhaps it was if they desired to avoid expounding their fiscal policy. But then why say that fiscal reform is the first constructive item in the Unionist programme? How can a reform be carried if it be not first explained and, secondly, defended? The futility of a propaganda by evasion is evident. Of course the truth is that the party has not one fiscal policy but two or even three policies; and exposition is avoided because it means the admission of disagreement. Mr Chamberlain wishes for the general restriction of manufactured imports, and Mr Balfour does not. The puzzling thing is what either of them hopes to gain by pretending to agree. So far their tactics have worked unparalleled mischief; and mischief the same tactics will continue to work.

The division on Sir J. Kitson's motion had lessons of

its own. All the efforts for unity had but a partial

Some Unionists voted for the motion, and many more abstained. The perverse ingenuity of the leaders brought only 98 followers into the lobby. How many of these were Balfourians is doubtful; but probably the thoroughgoing Chamberlainites may be reckoned at about 85. To carry Tariff Reform these must be raised to at least 340. Is there any visionary who believes that this can be done?

The impracticability of carrying Tariff Reform is so evident that we cannot help hoping that Tariff Reformers may realise and admit it. If they maintain their restrictionist policy, they must eventually part company with Mr Balfour and his friends. If they give up the restriction of manufactured imports, they give up (as they themselves would say) the most popular part of their programme; and, urging Preference and Retaliation alone, are doomed to certain defeat. In either alternative victory is impossible. Some delude themselves with the hope of a coalition with the Labour party and the Irish party. But such an alliance could only be on terms; and those terms must alienate that body of Conservative opinion which is now the main prop of Tariff Reform. Let the situation be viewed from every side, and the more it is looked at the more hopeless appear the prospects of the Tariff Reformers. We do not speak of the merits of the controversy; but, on the humbler issue of what is possible, is it too much to ask that Tariff Reformers should accept the unanswerable logic of facts?

Be that as it may, we are persuaded that the interests of the Unionist party and of the great causes it defends will be best consulted by shelving the whole subject. Then we shall be clear of the damning imputation of plutocracy; then we shall be able to welcome an understanding with that large body of moderate Liberal opinion which is so plainly ill at ease where it is. Thus, uniting all the truly conservative forces in the country, we may resume the position of 1895, and, defending the existing constitution and social order, may proceed with those temperate reforms which, while they excite little controversy and stir no passion, yet effect whatever legislation can do, to ameliorate the condition of the people.

Art. XIV. THE EDUCATION BILL.

TEN years ago a triumphant Unionist majority spent a substantial portion of the first session after the general election from which it sprang in an unsuccessful attempt to settle the Education Question. Its leaders had made promises to important sections of their supporters, the friends of the voluntary schools, that the 'intolerable strain' cast upon them by the growing demands of the central authorities and by the rate-fed competition of the Board schools should be relieved. But not having a clear view as to what was essentially desirable, or as to the best methods of attaining it, with no coherent pressure of opinion behind them, and with an Opposition, scanty in numbers but passionately combative and resourcefully led, they fell into hopeless difficulties, and had to withdraw their Bill. Thereafter no convenient season for an attempt at a real settlement of the education problem presented itself in that Parliament; and it was only when, owing mainly to an Imperial emergency of a special character, they had been again returned to power with a great majority that the Unionists were able to carry into law a comprehensive measure on that subject.

These reminiscences are not without their lesson for the politicians now in power. Now again we have a great and, indeed, a numerically overwhelming majority, but on the other side in politics. As in 1895, the promise to deal with one aspect of the education question has been one of the more prominent features of the programme put forward by the leaders of the victorious party, but by no means the most prominent. Broadly speaking, the promise to redress the grievances alleged to have been created among Nonconformists by the working of the elementary education clauses of the Act of 1902 occupied, on the Liberal side, during the recent electoral campaign, about the same position of importance in relation to the fiscal question as the promise to do justice to the voluntary schools occupied in relation to Home Rule on the Unionist side in 1895. The Liberal Government, therefore, are entitled and are, indeed, bound to deal with the subject; and no surprise was caused by the early intimation that an Education Bill would form the

leading feature of the programme of their first session. The Bill has appeared; and it has been found to involve nothing short of a revolution in the nature of the provision available for the education of the children of the working-classes over the whole of rural England and, to a very large extent, urban England also.

There was no revolution in the Act of 1870 or in that of 1902. Both those great measures, though we are not at all concerned to maintain that either of them was a sample of perfect legislation, were essentially in harmony with English parliamentary tradition. Neither of them destroyed anything. In the Act of 1870, Parliament, finding that the existing system of state-aided voluntary schools was failing to meet the needs of large masses of urban populations, invited and encouraged the religious denominations to develope that system, so as to meet the needs in question as fully as possible; and only where, after a period of grace, they had failed, or where, as in London, it was, from the first, out of their power to overtake such vast requirements, was the School Board machinery set up. After the lapse of a generation, Parliament, in the Act of 1902, finding that the friends of voluntary schools, who had responded splendidly to the invitation of the Act of 1870, were yet, through no fault of their own, unable to keep their schools generally abreast of the advancing standards of public education, placed them on a level in respect of claim on public funds, local as well as general, for ordinary educational maintenance, while continuing to charge the trustees with the upkeep of the buildings. In return for the relief thus given them, they came under the control of the local authority in the matter of secular education; and, in return for their continued acceptance of the burden of keeping up the fabric, and for its free use, they were authorised to carry forward religious instruction on the old lines. With that view, they were to retain in their hands the appointment of teachers, subject to the veto of the local authorities, exercisable only on educational grounds, in regard to any individual selection.

The result has been that in the villages of England, while there has been a gradual levelling-up in respect of secular education where the staff had been defective in quality or deficient in strength, the essentially and

definitely religious character of the schools has been preserved. At the same time full security has been taken by the infusion of a public representative element into the boards of management, against the possibility of the continuance of any oppressive treatment of children not connected with the denomination to which the school was attached. Thus, in rural England, during the last three years, the type of school with which the people were familiar has been maintained, but with enhanced educational efficiency and with the removal of the liability to abuse on the part of the small minority of narrowminded or overbearing clergy. In the towns, the workingclasses have retained the choice of schools for their children which had generally existed since 1870, with the advantage that the level of secular education in denominational schools is rising, and probably has generally already risen to that common among the better of the publicly provided schools.

That, in these circumstances, the great majority of the electors at the January polls had any idea whatever of promoting radical alterations in the general character of the school arrangements familiar to them is a supposition altogether contrary to all that is known of the English temperament. But among a number of issues put forward by Liberal leaders and their followers, they heard, with a sympathy creditable to their sense of justice, the insistent claim that certain grievances alleged to have been inflicted on Nonconformists by the Education Act of 1902 should be removed. These grievances were mainly three-first, that felt by Nonconformist ratepayers who objected to being required to contribute to the support of schools in which religious teaching of types which they disapproved was maintained; secondly, that felt by Nonconformist teachers, who considered themselves unjustly debarred, on the ground of their religion, from entrance into a considerable proportion of what they affirmed to have become practically a branch of the home civil service; and thirdly, the grievance of the Nonconformist parent in the single-school areas, who might, in regard to the religious education of his child, have no choice between a type of teaching altogether alien to his feelings and no religious instruction at all.

These grievances varied in their cogency and pressure

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