scheme of Privy Council grants in aid of local
effort, has not yet encountered.

There are, no doubt, one or two serious objections
to the present method. It stimulates local
effort, but there can be no local effort made
without its representative, and the whole work
of raising and begging for school money is thrown
on the clergy: not of the Church only, but of
almost all denominations. The quantity of work
of this kind thrown upon ministers of religion is
very great indeed, and the transformation of them
into a great body of Christian duns is rather
too complete. Yet this cannot very well be
helped. Somebody must be the recognised
promoter of its schools for the poor in each district.
It is not the doctor's, the lawyer's, or the
butcher's business. By whom can the place be so
fitly taken as by the minister of religion?

This is very hard on many a clergyman,
and arises from too many of the laity
neglecting their plain duty. In a parish of eight
thousand acres of the best land in Herefordshire,
yielding a rental of at least twelve
thousand a year, the landowners, two of them
peers, and one a very rich peer, by their
united subscriptions raise only eighteen pounds
a year for support of the schools. The poor
incumbent pays the rest, partly himself, partly by
levies on his private friends. That is but one
example of a common case. The burden of the
clergy, nevertheless, becomes small wherever the
nature of it is fully and fairly understood by the
people.

Some districts that cannot, and there are
districts that will not, raise money to be met
by Privy Council grant, and so establish schools.
Here, suggests Mr. Senior, you may encourage
the running together of three or four adjacent
parishes, as at Faversham, into a single district,
with a district school; and you may abandon
the requirement of the committee of Privy
Council that the school subscriptions which it
meets with its grant shall be local. But when
all that is done, all is not done, and nothing,
says Mr. Senior, remains but a local rate,
exceptionally imposed from without (not by the
district on itself) wherever it is reported to be
necessary; the rate being, not for the whole
amount required to establish and maintain the
school, but for as much as would suffice when
there has been added to it the grant by which it
would be doubled if the money were raised in
the way of voluntary subscription.

Everything else failing, better the rate than
the ignorance and degradation. But we are not
sure that everything else ought to fail. The excitement
of spontaneous action should be the main
object of those who would have any work done
heartily in England. If it be not ridiculous to
send missionary preachers to Jerusalem, it may
not be ridiculous to send missionary teachers into
the land at home, of the men who can't and the
men who won't see that their children are made
rational beings. Whatever is done in England is
best done by stirring men to put their own good
hearts and souls into the doing of it. Why should
there not be a society to hold its annual May
meeting in Exeter Hall, and report how—with
its subscriptions doubled by a government
grant—it had trained missionary schoolmasters,
paid with sufficient salaries for planting
themselves in neglected districts, and devoting
all their energies to the creation of a little school
for the poor children, and of an interest in its
work and its well-being by the parents? We
believe firmly, that the English plan of government
support to voluntary effort, is the right one;
but we believe, also, that where voluntary effort
does arise spontaneously, it is by the right earnest
action of the people upon themselves that true
and sound progress is to be obtained: not by
the cold imposition from without of an
exceptional education rate. Suppose, for example,
a fund called the Missionary Teachers' Fund,
maintained by private donation and subscription,
and subsidised by the committee of Council
on Education, upon certain conditions, that
would ensure its fair efficiency. Let it have means
proportionate to the vast income raised to
satisfy a sentiment, on behalf of savages at the
far ends of the world; let it have a working
committee of the men known to be most active and
earnest in labour for the education of the people;
and let it have one thoroughly good school for
the training of its missionaries, not only in
knowledge, but in tact and discretion. Somebody
might endow in it a Professorship of the
Art of Keeping One's-self Out of Hot Water.
When the missionary is fit for his work, let him
be placed with a modest but sufficient stipend in
a cottage in some one of the neglected districts,
with some little supply in one of its rooms, of
the machinery for teaching, and then leave him,
with a social position, independent of his
neighbours, to pick up scholars, to make friends, to
rub down angles of prejudice, quietly to diffuse
sound notions about education; and if the
parish be one that could and wouldn't do its
duty, turn it insensibly into one of those that
can and will; or, if it be one that would and
couldn't, secure for it a free gift of what it
needs, and has not means to procure. It is a
great thing to get neighbouring poor or small
parishes to work together, and unite their strength
for the sustainment of a common school. To that
end, where it was attainable, or by whatever way
might seem the quietest and nearest to their
object, the missionary teachers should know how
to work.

Mr. Senior complains that the form of united
action which consists in the adoption of large
district schools for pauper children by adjoining
parishes, although provided for by government,
has found so little favour that only about half a
dozen such schools have been formed, and there
are twice as many workhouse children taught
in equally good " separate schools" of the
guardians' own contriving. Doubtless it is most
true that workhouse children are taught better,
and are better secured against contamination that
will neutralise the good effect of any teaching,
when they are at school away from the bad
influences of the workhouse. "The children,"
say the Poor Law Inquiry Commissioners,