There can be no doubt that, speaking generally, our schools have not been sufficiently officered, either as to quantity or quality of teachers. The only wonder is that so insufficient a staff has often achieved so many excellent results. The new system will, we imagine, attempt to increase the number of teachers, which poverty has generally kept down. We refer once more to the Report of the London School Board's Educational Committee. They say-We are of the opinion that the minimum number of teachers for a school of 500 children should be 16-namely, 1 head teacher, 4 assistant teachers, and 11 pupil teachers; and that the teaching staff should be increased by 1 assistant teacher and 3 pupil teachers for additional 120 children.' inferior to those of our continental neigh- | looked upon as the one task which needs bours. Can we not rival the results which, neither training nor special preparation of for instance, Switzerland or Germany has knowledge, as the refuge, in fact, of the attained? All evidence seems to show that broken down and the destitute. All this the answer rests on two conditions-the pro- must be swept away. The Board schools will vision of a proper supply of teachers, and be universally public elementary schools,' the power to ensure regular attendance. that is, under Government inspection and its conditions; all the existing schools, virtually public, will have also to become 'public' in this technical sense; nor can we suppose that the time is far distant when something like 'Scholastic registration' will be required, to weed out from the profession the teachers who cannot teach, and the rulers who cannot rule. All these things point, as we have said, to an improvement in the quality of teachers. The only difficulty is-and it is one of the most serious of all-where are these teachers to come from? In time we have little doubt that they will be forthcoming. The position, and perhaps the average stipend, will be raised; the supply will correspond to the demand. But at the first start there will be very great difficulty. The Education Department has apparently provided for this by the enactment to which we have already alluded;* probably, if necessity is shown, it may see its way to relax a little more the stringency of its regulations, provided that real efficiency be secured. In fact, its requirement of certificates is an inconsistency, though, we think, a wise and noble inconsistency, with the bare principle of 'payment by results,' which the introducers of the Re It is understood that this is but an opinion, not so necessarily binding as to determine the future action of the Board; but it has been arrived at after careful consideration; it represents the opinion of the most influential members; and it will probably be accepted in substance. No one who knows anything of ordinary elementary schools will be slow to perceive that such a staff is far above the average. But, if education is to be intelli-vised Code so loudly professed; and, under gent, if it is to bring the mind of the teacher to bear on the mind of the pupil, if it is to dispense with those merely mechanical processes under which knowledge lightly comes and lightly goes, some such provision of teachers is not excessive. It will (as we have said) be very difficult for the existing schools to rival it, and yet rival it they must, if they are to hold their own. But that its necessity is recognised, and that there is a resolution to supply it, are hopeful signs for the education of the future. But there is need, also, of some advance in quality as well as in quantity. It is probably well-known to our readers that hitherto a large number of the existing public schools have not been brought under Government inspection, mainly because they have not had certificated teachers; in those cases there is no security whatever that the teachers are efficient, and, as a matter of fact, we believe that, with some distinguished exceptions, they fall decidedly below the proper standard. What is the character of the teachers of very many private adventure schools' it is needless, and would be painful, to state in detail. The task of teaching is still too often these circumstances, it ought to feel free to construe it somewhat liberally. In any case, as we have said, there will be trouble enough in starting. Probably in three years the number of certificated teachers in England must be nearly trebled; and even afterwards *New Code 59. During the three years ending 31st December, 1873, certificates of the third class may be granted, without examination, upon the report of an Inspector, to acting teachers who satisfy the following conditions: (1.) They must, at the date of the Inspector's report, (a.) Be above 35 years of age; (b.) Have been teachers of elementary schools for at least 10 years; and (c.) Present certificates of good character from the managers of their schools. (2.) The Inspector must report,— (a.) That they are efficient teachers; (b.) That not less than 30 children, who had been under instruction in their schools, during the preceding six months, were individually examined (Article 28); and (c.) That at least 20 of the 'passes' of these scholars in reading, writing, or arithmetic, were made in the second, or some higher, Standard. the supply needed will be greatly in excess of what has been hitherto required. How is it to be furnished? All who are acquainted with the subject will be aware that any competent teacher has long been able to gain a certificate by examination, without going to a training college, and now (as we have already seen) is allowed to receive one on proof of experience, without examination. These provisions will, we hope, do much towards the needful supply. If only the position and prospects of the school teachers can be improved, many will enter or come back to this special form of educational work; and we would suggest that perhaps more use might be made (as is done in America) of female teachers, even in boys' schools, so that here some of the 600,000 overplus of females, of which the last Census informs us, may be taken up and utilized. But the real backbone of the teaching body will be found in the trained teachers. We cannot too strongly urge upon all who care for education, what we have already urged in the interests of religion, that the great want is likely to be the want of more training colleges. The Boards have under the Act no power to found them; there will be great difficulty, especially in the present attitude of the Government towards religion, in creating them through the Education Department. It will be far better for the future of Christian Education, if the Church and other religious bodies will devote their special energies to this important work. One training college, as we have said, will be worth very many elementary schools; the present colleges may be enlarged, even if no new ones are built; possibly some colleges of a higher class might be induced to form departments for this special work. This matter is really. one of the most important, and perhaps perplexing, of all. For want of success here all other exertions may be baffled, and the largest and most costly organisation half paralysed. But there is still one other condition which must be fulfilled, if the educational progress we hope for is to be realized. All competent teachers cry with one voice, 'Give us the children in regular attendance for a sufficient time, and we will teach them anything which in reason you can demand.' It has been in this, far more than in any other difficulty, that the weakness of our educational system has hitherto been manifest. There are crowds of children who do not come to school at all; there are still larger numbers whose attendance is so short and irregular that anything beyond the merest smattering is a thing impossible. Take again the statistics of this very division of Westminster, in which we are writing. There are schools which at the authorized allowance of 8 square feet per child could take in 28,292 children. Now only 23,680 are on the rolls. There is room, therefore, for some 5,000 more, out of the 20,000, or thereabouts, who still fail to come. But this is not all; at the time of enumeration there were but 16,657 in actual attendance-that is, unless the day was especially unfortunate, there are no less than 7000 children in irregular attendance, coming one day or one week and absent the next. And this is a far more serious defect even than the other, for this irregularity really mars the teaching of the school, and produces a mere illusory shadow of education in the children. Here is, after all, the crying evil. There are thousands of children in London who have, actually or virtually, no parents; who scramble on as they can by their own earnings or beggings or stealings, hanging loose on the outskirts of society. These never enter our schools at all; their school of low and precocious cunning is found in the streets, and their teachers are misery and crime. Then there are thousands of parents too poor, or too idle, or too dissolute, to do without the little earnings of their children, or, perhaps, too ignorant and too careless to know the value of education for them. Their little ones are the absentees or the irregular comers. Something must be done to remedy these crying evils. What is it to be? The Education Act suggests compulsion, and arms the Boards with compulsory pow ers. These powers were but permissive, but one Board after another has accepted the responsibility, and affirmed the absolute necessity of exercising them; and the districts which have no School Boards are crying out for some compulsory machinery which shall extend to them. Public opinion has on the whole supported these views and these resolutions. Even our national dislike of compulsion in any shape, and our jealous anxiety for individual liberty of parent or child, have given way. We are beginning to find, in this as in other matters, that we must have some government, some coercion of licence and selfishness, when they clothe themselves in the sacred garb of Liberty. Another great experiment is to be made: we rejoice that it is to be attempted, and wish it all success. But the task will certainly be one of extreme delicacy and difficulty. It must be so carried out as to retain the support of public opinion, especially in the classes chiefly concerned; and this it will not do, unless it carefully avoids undue precipitation, and uses discrimination and even tenderness to avoid infliction of real hardship. The experience of the compulsory system in America (although authorities vary respecting it) is on the whole somewhat discouraging. Laws stringent in theory, and a dead letter in practice, are worse than useless; they simply demoralize a people. And what can we say of the working of such compulsory Acts as we have in England? Look at the results of the Vaccination Act. In the face of the most decisive medical statistics known, under the terror of what we fondly deemed an almost extinct species of epidemic in London, still the law is defied, and the authorities, it seems, dare not enforce it. Yet smallpox is more easily recognised as an evil than ignorance, and the sending a child to school is a greater sacrifice than allowing it to be vaccinated. Evidently we are on dangerous ground. We must not on that account stop or hesitate; but we must look to our feet. The worst difficulty will not be with the vagabond classes, the children who are neither at school nor at work, but who are haunting the streets, living on waifs and strays, and forming the nursery of our criminal classes. It will be expensive, and in some points difficult, to lay hold of these children, and to settle how they shall be fed and clothed while they are being taught. But the object is so desirable, so free from all drawback, so manifestly expedient in the long run, that there will be no hesitation about it on the part of the public; and when this is the case, the work is half done. The Industrial Schools Act must be worked and perhaps extended; the 'Ragged School' system must be taken up by authority. Something perhaps may be done (as the experiment of the Chichester' shows) to solve by this means the problem of a nursery for our Army and Navy. It is not expense or difficulty of detail which will baffle or even naturally impede such a work as this. The true perplexity lies in dealing with the children who are at work, and whose earnings are, or are supposed to be, necessary for the subsistence of themselves and their parents. No doubt, in the long run, it will be good even for their families to carry them off. Their labour will become more valuable when they are educated, and their withdrawal from the labour market must eventually give more employment to their elders. But in the meanwhile there may be wide-spread hardship, and, unless great prudence be shown, the process will break down, because magistrates will hesitate to convict and imprison defaulters, and public opinion will be apt to rise up against them if they prove to be made of sterner stuff. Much will have to be done by nightschools and variations of the half-time system to meet the needs of other employments, agricultural or commercial, than those in which its present form works so well. Of course, in cases of real poverty, fees must be remitted or paid; and (reverting to a subject already noticed) we would warn the Boards to confine their compulsion within as narrow limits as may be, and leave the widest liberty of choice as to the particular school or kind of school. But whatever may be done, we feel convinced that direct compulsion must be supplemented by indirect. If the Factory and Workshops Acts be made thoroughly effective, and modified with a view to extend as widely as possible the principle of making the employer responsible for seeing that children earning wages from him are either sufficiently instructed already or are attending school, the compulsory powers of the Boards will be in great degree relieved of strain at the only point at which they are in danger of breaking down. And they will be also greatly helped if a little of the task of compulsion be taken off them by forcing the Guardians to carry out those excellent provisions of Evelyn Denison's Act, which make the sending the children of outdoor paupers to school a part of parochial relief. At present this Act, now simply permissive, is disgracefully neglected. It appeared by a recent return, that out of 38,577 children of outdoor paupers in London, only 3125 were paid for at school by the Guardians. At St. Pancras there are 2136 such children, and not a single one is paid for in the Strand Union the Guardians actually have the face to answer, 'Nothing known about such an Act.' Evidently such a state of things ought not to be allowed: the Guardians have had a fair trial under a permissive system, and now we hope that the screw will be put on at once. All this belongs to the Home Office; we wish that our experience of its energies were more satisfactory. But Mr. Bruce would find an easier field here, and might actually wipe out the remembrance of his cab legislation and his Licensing Bill. These and other similar precautions must be taken, and the fervour of new-born converts to compulsion must be tempered by the remembrance that it is our last resource that, like the rod, it may often be most effective by being kept simply in terrorem that its failure would leave us in a far worse | become candidates and have been elected. plight than at present, while it is still un- That they should have been willing to untried. But it must be attempted; on its dertake a task which is full of labour and success more depends than even on the difficulty, of doubt and responsibility, and other points on which we have already which brings with it no compensating addwelt. If we are really discriminating and vantages of remuneration and position, shows make allowance for the difficulties which at once the amount of interest felt, and the society imposes on the individual, then we strong public spirit, which is ready, now as may be just and fear not.' The work will always, for public duty. That they should succeed, and it will be one which our child- have been so generally elected, that the rateren and our children's children will bless. payers should have chosen men who put education first and economy second, and who desire. to do their work in a liberal and uncompromising spirit, is a proof that the country at large is leavened with that same interest in the subject which hitherto has been confined to certain classes. The proceedings of the Boards themselves have shown a desire not only to make Elementary Education thorough, but to remember that National Education must be looked upon as a whole, and that no system is good which does not weld together the various classes of schools, and therefore the various classes of the community, so that not only shall a good average of knowledge be obtainable by all, but there shall be, for those who are capable of higher things, a means of climbing the ladder, which has (to use a phrase now famous) 'its foot in the gutter and its top in the University.' In all these things we rejoice: they may last in full vigour only for a time, but in that time they will give an impulse which will never be lost. If a reactionary feeling should come over us, and a stationary period succeed the present, still a vastly higher level will have been reached, and in these matters there can be no steps backward. In these ways we hope that a real improvement may take place in the work of our Elementary Schools; and we look forward, lastly, to another influence acting in the same direction, to stimulate and to test such improvement. The Government inspection must be in some way extended, so as to reach at least all Elementary Schools. Probably almost all the large schools will come into the present system, simply making themselves' Public Elementary Schools' in the meaning of the Act. But a beginning has been made, which will hardly be allowed to remain fruitless, towards a larger and more varied system. All the existing schools not already under regular inspection are to be now called upon to submit to be inspected by the Education Department, in order to test their efficiency in teaching, under pain of being ignored in estimating the educational resources of the various localities. We understand that the inspection (as indeed is necessary) is to be conducted by rather freer and less technical methods than usual, looking to tolerable efficiency of any kind, rather than to efficiency after a particular type and pattern. We cannot but hope that the experiment will not be altogether dropped, when it has done its immediate duty. The Public Elementary Schools' will be our regular forces, and we care not how strictly they are drilled and disciplined: but there may well be an outside fringe of valuable but irregular combatants against ignorance, who may be all the more useful for being somewhat more loosely ordered. So, we think, shall we best secure that general inspection, without which no regularity and universality of educational work can be for any length of time ensured. It is not (as we have said) on mere legal obligation or a sense of expediency that we rely. Fill our schools that you may empty our workhouses and our gaols,' is a good common-sense cry, but such cries never reach the depths: they may support, but cannot create enthusiasm. The intellectual zeal for the discovery and the spread of truth, the sense of our moral duty to our fellow citizens and of the need of morality for their own culture and happiness, the warm spirit of sympathy which shrinks from seeing the These are some of the directions in which, misery of ignorance in others, as it would confidently, almost certainly, we expect to from the misery of poverty and starvationsee true progress. But independently of all these elements must act upon the spirit these special forces and modes of action, we of the nation, to make it rise to its high rely on the great and thorough awakening duty. And we are stating no matter of of public interest in education, the evidences theory, but a matter of sober historical fact, of which actually crowd upon our view. when we say that hitherto in the annals of Nothing is more remarkable than the deep the world no movement has united and harinterest shown in the School Board elec-monized these various elements in its sertions, and the high class of men who have vice, unless it has been able to invoke the |