The population of the city having grown more rapidly than the funds to erect buildings, the Board of Education has been obliged to lease a number of buildings to provide sittings for children. The necessity for this will, however, it is hoped, soon pass. The pupils in the half-day sessions are those of the youngest classes. The total number of seats in buildings owned by the city for the year 1898-99 was 213,753; seats in rented rooms, 15,545; total, 229,298; pupils in half-day sessions, 16,210.

The city schools are supported by state and city tax, from the income of real estate, bonds, and from minor sources. The following statement gives a summary of receipts and expenditures for the school year, 1898-99: total available for the school year ending June 30, 1899, cash on hand, $1,116,561.45; receipts, $7,909,558.69; total, $9,026,120.14. Among the items of expenditure are: superintendents' and teachers' salaries, primary and grammar schools, $3,975,382.75; new school buildings and incidental expenses in connection with the erection of the same, $1,000,663.69; evening schools, $89,537.78; school supplies, including ink, paper, pens, pencils, crayons, stationery, etc., $49,563.32; school libraries, reference books, maps, charts, globes, etc., $36,739.81; text-books for indigent pupils, $45,514.31. Four new schools and eleven additions to old schools were built last year. The cost of the new schools (sites included) varied from $70,000 to $125,000 each.

(Concluded next month.)

TENDENCIES OF MODERN EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. PROFESSOR JOHN MASSIE, M.A., J. P., MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD, ENG.

THE

HE particular tendency of modern education on which I would speak is the tendency to co-ordinate State duty with religious equality. Lecturing last month in Oxford to the summer meeting of the University Extension on his recent experience in this country, Professor Dicey said, by way of general commendation, that the Americans seemed to have solved the great question of religious freedom; that there was a kind of religious freedom in America which did not appear to him to

exist anywhere else; that religious profession in England tended to associate itself with social position, and it was not right that a man's views of the Deity and his future in the next world should have any effect upon his social position in this; that equality of religion had been more fairly established in America than anywhere else."

Many of those to whom he spoke were only too well aware that England is as yet very far from this consummation. In the old country the shadow of a church umbrageous with State connection and social prestige hangs over all our relations. It darkens even the vision of the ordinary Englishman as he looks out upon other lands. I heard a widely traveled and otherwise well-informed English naval officer say the other day, "The cream of the Americans are Episcopalians." This shadow overhangs, most especially, our educational relations. The day of overt test is, indeed, very much in the gloaming; the day of covert test is still at high noon. In schools supported by the State we have a conscience clause which exempts, but all the while distinguishes and brands, and the counterpart of which your Supreme Court of Wisconsin justly decided was, in the common schools, an intolerable mark of inequality. We have eight thousand parishes in which Nonconformist children, as we still unhappily have to call them, are compelled to attend Church of England or Roman Catholic schools supported by the State and by the State maintained in their monopoly; the people of these parishes are not at liberty to have schools under their own management, however willing they may be to pay rates for them. The training colleges for our school-teachers are practically in the hands of the dominant church, though they also are in the main supported by the State, and in these there is not even a conscience clause, except in one which is now being erected, and there it will not be of law but of grace, and only for outsiders, not for residents, while the management will be in the hands of a lady of notoriously ecclesiastical proclivities, who had to leave the Royal Holloway College because she had devoted herself to "dishing Nonconformists." The same dominant ecclesiastical influence prevents public training colleges from being established, though there is at the present time nothing like sufficient accommodation for the pupil teachers

who have gained Queen's Scholarships entitling them to training. In most of our higher schools, tied and bound almost all of them to the same Church, there are, it is true, conscience clauses; but where there are boarding houses, a head master can, if he chooses, prevent the assistant master, who is head of the house, from admitting a boy whose religion is likely to cause trouble. And in these higher schools, even where the school is local and the neighboring population is mainly Nonconformist, no university man who is a Nonconformist, however high his qualifications, would have a chance of being elected to the head mastership. For such a man to obtain an assistant mastership is only less difficult. In an advertisement issued in July last for a third-assistant master for the City of London Freemen's Orphans School, the condition was appended that he "must be a churchman"; and yet the maintenance of this school is charged upon the city estates to the extent of more than £5,000 a year. Well may it be said by the editor of the Liberator in his letter on the subject: "Such a provision as that mentioned in the advertisement only excludes men of conscientious rectitude and a delicate sense of honor. Not a few candidates will remember the sarcastic advice of Carlyle, Fools; you should be quiet infidels, and believe!"" The fact is that for teachers who have a conscience forbidding them to conform to the dominant church, there is in England, broadly speaking, in the teaching profession no career whatever. But if the would-be teachers lose much the teaching profession loses far more. America, happily for itself, knows no such loss.

6

Just as in none of our public schools, commonly so called, is there any religious service except the service of the dominant church, so also is it with our residential universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Durham and Dublin. Students are free to seek their own churches, but the college chapels are exclusive appanages of the Established Church, and none but a clergyman of that church can conduct a service in them or in the university church. Similarly, none but an Established Church clergyman can be an examiner in the theological schools, and no Nonconformist has yet been certified as a theological teacher in the universities I have mentioned. Of recent years, moreover, certain colleges whose endowments confined to the adher

ents of the Established Church have been allowed to circumvent the act passed in 1870 for the abolition of tests, and to acquire the status of colleges in a university where, by that act, no such tests exist.

On every hand, therefore, in England we are still, in education, hampered by the old fetters, and that though year by year the sons of Nonconformists carry off some of the highest honors and the best prizes even in theology, at Oxford and Cambridge.

Yet the general trend of educational policy and practice is in the direction of fair play,—at any rate when those are in power who care for education rather than for denomination. The problem they strive to solve is how to conduct and develop a system of national education without treading upon religious convictions. But the struggle is a hard one, and over the fight the darkness sometimes gathers. The shadow of the superincumbent church now waxes and now wanes. At the present moment, I suspect, it is growing less. The leaves of the tree which once in our history were for the healing of our nation are just now the nest of the cankerworm. The leaves of the Reformation have been one by one disappearing, and the ordinary Englishman, as he looks through the unlovely branches, naked and unadorned, is beginning to talk of withdrawing those shoring timbers which are keeping the tree upright only for the cankerworms. Meanwhile, however,-to vary the figure-the informal alliance between Anglican and Roman Catholic to lead the Anglican Church back to Rome, is a formal alliance to prevent the co-ordination of religious equality and civil unity with our educational system. By means of a fortuitous but overwhelming Parliamentary majority and a subservient Education Department, the anti-national and privately managed system of elementary education has been relieved by the State from almost the last straw of financial responsibility; whereas the State system is being deliberately hampered, and has to be championed by voluntary societies of educational reformers, while the cynical representative of the Department in the House of Commons gibes at his policy and retains his post. In the zone of education between elementary school and university, the only legislative movement of any importance shows no tendency in the direction of religious equality. The recent act establishing

a Board of Education provides for alterations of the Endowed Schools Acts (under which, through the Charity Commissioners, many steps, though by no means steps enough, in the direction of religious equality have been taken) to be made, not by Parliament but by Orders of that very Council to which the subservient Education Department belongs, and there is nothing in that Act to prevent diocesan associations from being employed in the inspection and the subsidizing of secondary schools. Meanwhile, under the patronage of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is evidently, at this stage of his career, dissatisfied with the moderation and unsectarianism of most of our head masters (of whom he used to be a type), a committee has been appointed in connection with the Diocesan Board of Education to secure systematic church teaching in secondary schools; and the Primate affirms that the proposal “harmonizes exactly" with the Board of Education Act recently passed. "It would be necessary," he said, "for the Diocesan Board, following the lead of the Government, to take an interest in secondary as well as primary education." So the religious difficulty forced by the church party. upon the elementary schools is to be forced by them upon the secondary schools likewise. Toward a remedy for the acknowledged training-college grievance no advance is being made. But it is on the zone of university education that I would ask leave to lay particular, though necessarily momentary stress, and in that region make to America a special appeal. The ideal of a university and of its relation to the State as illustrated by modern tendencies has been within the last twelve months brought once more into discussion by Mr. Balfour's proposal to endow from the national exchequer a university for Irish Roman Catholics. In this arena you in America have not been free from conflict. In your State universities, wherever they are, it has been your aim and your achievement to secure absolute equality for all your citizens, to whatever church they belong, or if no church at all can claim them. It is one of the noblest and most significent symptoms of religious freedom that your State universities can rarely furnish statistics of the religious belief of their students. When I tried a few months ago to ascertain the number of Roman Catholic students at these universities, I was confronted with