which the events took place. He will gather from this that, when possible, geography should be made subsidiary to history, and that reference to the plan of a campaign, or to the map of a country, when he is teaching history, will add much to the interest, and consequently to the success of his lessons.

Finally, I would urge on all teachers the importance of giving to the constitution and government of our country a more prominent place in their teaching than they have been accustomed to concede. It is a shame that pupils should leave school, after "going through" a textbook, with their heads full of the technicalities of history, with the power to talk flippantly about the Druids and the "Heptarchy," about Ethelwolf and St. Dunstan, but wholly unable to tell what the House of Commons is, or how far the prerogative of the Crown extends, or how justice is administered in our courts of law. Yet it not unfrequently happens that a paragon of school erudition, who has gained history prizes, is yet sorely at a loss on points like these. It would be well, therefore, if in every school the regular readings and lessons were supplemented occasionally by special teaching, either in the form of a conversational lecture, or otherwise, on the Sovereign, the House of Peers, the Commons, the power of Parliament, the process of making a Law, Courts of justice and their procedure, Trial by jury, Taxes, why and how they are levied, etc. It is probable that all the information required for such lessons will not be found in any ordinary compendium of history, but that the teacher will find it necessary to seek his materials from other sources, and to illustrate his lesson by drawing on his own experience, or by taking advantage of an election, or the occurrence of the assizes in the place in which he lives. I need hardly say that in Blackstone, in Hallam, in Creasy, or in Lord Brougham's book on the Constitution, ample materials will be found for such lessons as he will need. It is manifest that information respecting the form of government under which we live, and the correlative rights and duties of persons in the several orders of society, is of great practical importance, and ought not to be overlooked in any intelligent plan of instruction. But besides the immediate value of the information thus communicated, there is an incidental purpose of great importance to be served by lessons on these subjects. It should be the aim of every teacher to impress his pupils with a sense of the privileges which they enjoy as citizens of a free country, and with a loving appreciation of the Constitution under which they live. It is no light thing to be an inheritor of the traditions which belong to Englishmen; to be connected with the glorious past and the noble future which a history like ours presents to us; to rest our feet upon a constitution, the foundations of which have been hardening and establishing themselves for centuries; to enter into the enjoyment of blessings-political, social, intellectual which the wisdom and patriotism and piety of our ancestors have won for us; to be citizens of

VOL. I.

"A land of great and old renown,

Where freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent."

D

Any scheme of instruction in history, even for the humblest elementary school, is seriously deficient, if it fails to inculcate not only knowledge, but feeling on these points. It has come to be considered almost an oldfashioned thing to talk of our "glorious Constitution" with the sort of enthusiastic reverence which was so familiar to our grandfathers. But the reasons for cherishing our own laws and institutions, and for feeling an affectionate pride in them, have certainly not diminished of late years. A teacher will do his pupils a great service if, by good and clear lessons, he will make the system of our civil and social polity comprehensible to them; and a still greater if, by the manner of giving such lessons, he can implant sentiments of intelligent loyalty in their minds.

I have not, in these remarks, said much of the way in which the maximum of historical information may be given to a pupil in the minimum of time, nor upon the best way of enabling him to pass an examination. I do not despise these things, but I think their importance is even too apparent to the minds of most teachers. After all, they are only means to ends. If we thought less of examinations, and more of the ultimate purposes which examinations are meant to serve, it would be well for us. And what is the ultimate purpose to be served in teaching history? Is it not to discipline the judgment and the conscience, as well as the memory of the learner? Is it not to make him fond of searching into the story of the past, and able to acquire from it the moral insight and the lessons of wisdom which it was designed to teach? Is it not to make him rather an accurate and painstaking learner in one or two departments, than a smatterer in all? When these objects are fairly before us, we shall find that rules for giving, even technical instruction will become clearer to us; our methods will prove more successful, even for examination purposes, than if we worked specially with a view to examinations; new interest will be awakened, new powers of mind called forth, and history will become to the learners, not a series of school lessons merely, but a scheme of moral discipline,

"The fair sum of six thousand years'
Traditions of civility."

JOSHUA G. FITCH.

VI PRIVY-COUNCIL CENTRALIZATION.

WE hear clamorous demands for a system of National Education, accompanied by ready-made theories for its realization. But no sooner do successive schemes breathe the atmosphere of Parliament than they are stifled by hostile criticism, or fall to the ground through prejudice and misapprehension One is almost disposed to think that no comprehensive legislative measure can ever receive so unanimous and

cordial a support as to make it really effective in its practical working. The differences of the contending parties we believe to be irreconcilable without compromise; and we suspect that for compromise our age is too much in earnest. Be that as it may, it is worthy of observation, that while our representatives are roused to passionate antagonism by any attempt to state the principles on which a school system shall be worked, they quietly acquiesce in the State's putting the educational machine in motion on principles on which none have been consulted, and in which, perhaps, none would wholly concur were they theoretically affirmed. The fact is, that the question is not an open one, and that the ground is already occupied. For nearly a generation we have had a national system in full operation, and yet, strange to say, we are unable to come to terms on the principles which ought to govern it. national system, in truth, exists only in so far as, by a successful evasion of legitimate national action, it has practically affirmed a national theory. The theory to which the nation has been thus committed, is, that all religious organizations which give an educational place-however humble or shadowy-to the Bible, are equally competent to train the youth of the country, and merit to be subsidized out of the public purse.

This

We do not here propose to animadvert either on the unconstitutional character of our Board of Education, or on the inconsistent attitude of Parliament in shrinking from affirming, as the principle of a national measure, what it yet annually proclaims to be its creed by an annual money vote. Nor shall we touch on the startling defects of the system itself, on the wealth which it lavishes on the wealthy, and the mite which it denies to the needy. It is easy to see that the whole organization has been an almost inevitable development of the arrangements necessary for the distribution of a few thousands, with a reasonable regard to equity, among the various educational bodies. It was to be expected that the administrative power should be forced from time to time to multiply its relations with these bodies, and to define, modify, or extend its ordinances. Original minutes, accordingly, were rescinded, new minutes passed, circulars sent to explain the minutes, and letters printed to explain the circulars, and now, at last, we have a code which wears the aspect of permanence.

With a consolidation of a gradually developed educational statute-law before us, which yet Parliament unworthily ignores, and whose principles it is afraid to discuss, it is natural that those really interested in the teaching of the people, and, above all, of the people's teacher, should take alarm at the existence of a powerful centralized administrative system, which, in all essential respects, is as secret and irresponsible as it is sure and effective in its working. This alarm is most keenly felt by those who know that much of the action of the Board has been in the teeth of influential opinions, and opposed to national or local conviction. The necessity of securing simplicity in working has led to the ignoring of local peculiarities; and local peculiarities, we well know, are often identical with local vitality. Centralization which has its source in the Legislature is bad enough, but centralization which is produced by

t

a kind of spontaneous generation must be afflicted in a peculiar degree with all the worst vices of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, we are convinced, is as opposed to the genius of our people as absolutism. Englishmen instinctively and truly feel that a bureaucrat is a doctrinaire, and bureaucracy a government by crotchets. Official views, which have little regard to provincial or even national habits, which ignore the great principle of free and unconscious, but not therefore unintelligent local action, are always hurtful, but especially so when unchecked by any statutory and well-canvassed principles of administration. A dull level of uniformity is dear to the bureaucratic eye, which fails to see that in the very act of destroying differences, it destroys life. It is this baleful tendency of our present national system which, we think, merits the grave consideration of the politician. It is because we do not wish to be reduced to the helplessness of Neapolitans, or to the trim feebleness in which paternal government usually issues, that we think it a question of great moment, whether the principles on which this country is governed in almost all other matters, should be subverted in a national department which has most to do with the making of the character of the people? That will be a sad day for England on which the local self-government of Constitutionalism will be exchanged for the centralization which is a common feature of absolutism and democracy. The bitterness of party and local feuds is certainly hastening the approach of that time in the department of popular education. The question is as urgent as it is important. A large mass of educational property is now created in which our educational bureau has invested: a large educational agency has already learned to look to this centre for the principles which are to guide it. Faint efforts to give expression to opinions have been put down by bad logic, supported by invincible money-power, and the result actually is, that in the management of all schools, but especially in the influential schools for the training of teachers, the one question which the authorities must uniformly ask themselves (disguise it to themselves as best they may) is not "What is best?" but "What will meet the wishes or avoid the animadversions of the Office or its agents?" And this subserviency extends not to general considerations alone, considerations connected with the what and how to teach, but descends to the minutest details bearing on the matériel and personnel of the schools. Nay, we are safe in asserting that the various local managing boards merely constitute a channel, through which Privy-Council legislation may run. Surely such a system as this must sensibly tend to affect the vigour and character of a nation, brought to bear, as it is, on that portion of national organization which tells most directly and powerfully on the people.

We are well aware that any attempt to incite to some remedial action by discussing political principles or propounding theories is almost hopeless. It is only when the operation of a law is felt to be a practical grievance that even the intelligent of a community will be roused to a sense of its importance. The administrative action which we denounce may not yet have been very keenly felt as a practical

grievance by parish committees or Diocesan boards. The local and voluntary action necessary for the purpose of complying with Government requirements they perhaps imagine to be local management. Their liberty is the liberty to acquiesce. This they probably mistake for free action. But there is surely one section of the community on which the present system presses with sufficient heaviness to lead them to feel its intellectual tyranny even while profiting by its dispensations. A Teacher is not a machine, and those, above all, who guide the education of the teacher must have ideas and aspirations of their own. If they are to realize their ideals, or even approximately to attain their aims, their course of action must not be limited even by the knowledge that it coincides with the instructions of a foreign power. The teaching profession in all its departments, and in those which have to do with popular education most of all, is not a mere executive. If it is anything, it is also and much more a legislative. Its life is a constant expression of intellectual and moral activity directed to the noblest objects. It must, therefore, work with the energy that comes from freedom, and from the sense that it can initiate as well as effect. Steadiness and loftiness of action can be secured only by the consciousness of a self-directing will. Centralization, by subduing individual character, stifles originality and paralyses the will. A centralized organization which begins its work in the earliest stage of training, and fits for its own special objects by a systematic cram and by a life spent under stringent regulations, must surely tend to emasculate the scholastic profession, by depriving it of what alone constitutes it as a profession worthy of respect, and capable of great purposes and great results,a healthy spontaneousness, and originative and free action.

We are far from animadverting on those who have worked the machine put into their hands. Men in such a position, whether bureaucrats and doctrinaires by nature or not, are forced to cut and clip to a uniform pattern, that they may avoid endless complications, insurmountable accumulations of cases requiring separate examination, and, the consequence of all this, a large preponderance of injustice. The administrators could not well have helped themselves; and the system they have reared, and the mute submissiveness of all concerned, whether recipients of the public money in the form of grants and "gratuities," or the Inspectors of schools, says much for the resoluteness of the Downing Street will and the effectiveness of its rule. Such results, no doubt, could not have been well attained without much domineering, some insolence, and large and even wilful ignorance. Much, however, is to be forgiven in honest admiration of the thorough mastery the administrators have attained over all their subjects, and of the efficient and upright way in which their work is done. But just in proportion to the efficiency of the administrators are the evils of the system.

K.