the London County Council, which has succeeded to the duties of the School Board for London. At least their work demands qualities of mind and action which are more commonly trained in the capital than in the provinces. Many years have passed since John Stuart Mill wrote:'It is quite hopeless to induce persons of a high class, either socially or intellectually, to take a share of local administration in a corner by piecemeal, as members of a Paving Board or a Drainage Committee. The entire local business is not more than a sufficient object to induce them to become members of a mere local body.'

But it is only within the last year that Mill's condition has been fulfilled by the inclusion of education among the functions of the same local bodies which take charge of the roads and the drains. Thus, it is not surprising that the new era in local government should be still but imperfectly understood, and that the country as a whole should fail to pay attention to the work of the 334 education committees formed to administer the Act. From one point of view this is a gain. It is not altogether undesirable that the committees responsible for the local control of national education should be suffered to make their experiments and, it may be, their mistakes, without further direct interference than that which is supplied by the Board of Education at one end of the scale and by the ratepayers at the other. At the same time, recognition is encouraging; and a comparison of results may lead to an economy of effort.

One such comparative result may be selected here. We remarked above that the training-college problem is the most urgent with which the Board of Education has to deal. The function of a training college is to provide professional training; and no defect is more conspicuous in the whole system of the Board than the inadequate supply of efficiently trained teachers for the elementary schools. It is interesting to note the local aspects of this problem. The authorities at Manchester write, in their second annual Report, dated October 26, 1904 :

'Much may be hoped from the effect of the new regulations . . . which had already been anticipated by this Committee, and provision made for bringing them into effect early in the ensuing year.' In the opinion of the committee,

'it is most desirable that measures should immediately be taken to make provision for securing an automatic supply of properly trained certificated teachers for the Public Elementary Schools.'

About 300 bursaries (80 for boys and 220 for girls) will accordingly be established in March, and will be awarded, on the results of a public examination, to candidates willing to become pupil teachers. These bursaries will be tenable in secondary or other day-schools; an examination of bursars about to complete their course will be held each May; and in the following August the selected candidates will be engaged as pupil teachers for a period of two years. Similarly, the committee recommend that provision should be made in the first instance in conveniently situated rented buildings for two undenominational residential colleges, one for women and another for men'; and, in connexion with the Pupil Teachers' College which is about to be erected, 'suitable provision should be made for day-certificate classes at which assistant teachers might receive, say, half-time instruction.'

The Gloucestershire authorities write, in their Report dated October 24, 1904 :

'It was inevitable that the change effected by the Act of 1902 should entail an enormous amount of administrative labour. . . . But it must be recognised that no great change can be looked for in the Elementary Schools until the Board of Education's new regulations for the instruction and training of teachers have had time to bear fruit.'

A scholarship scheme has been started in the county; and other steps have been taken which, it is hoped, 'will bring more recruits into the teaching profession, and remedy the deficiency which still is, and must for some time remain, acute.' The same story is repeated in Northumberland and other centres, till we reach the excellent Report on Secondary Education in Liverpool,' by Professor Sadler, to which reference has already been made. In the sixth chapter of that work, which should by this time be in the hands of every education committee in the country, the writer discusses the 'Supply and Training of Elementary School Teachers,' and adds 'Suggestions and Recommendations.' This is not the place to consider the specific needs of Liverpool, or the means

of supplying them; but Mr Sadler expressly states, as a general principle of training, that, in order to draw the future pupil teachers to the secondary schools, a scholarship system will be necessary.' Articles 8, 9, 10, and 11 of the seventeen recommendations contained in the summary of his Report are stated as follows:

'To develop the scholarship system; to take various steps for improving the supply and preliminary training of those intending to teach in elementary schools; to strengthen the Pupil Teacher Centres; to establish a new Training College for women teachers; to enlarge the University Day Training College, and to establish hostels in connexion with it.'

Authorities in other parts of the country will welcome the support of so eminent an expert as Mr Sadler in this important respect.

We have attempted to illustrate the work of the education committees by directing attention to a single aspect of their labours. But, however typical the example, it is merely an example. Instances might be multiplied in which the various reports shed light upon one another, and in which the local authorities might give mutual assistance. An exhaustive survey would lead to considerable repetition, and might be wearisome to follow in detail. The essence of the matter is that the nation should be aware of the great work which is being done in its midst. Despite the clamour of party politicians, and the threat to undo the legislation of 1902-3 when the present Government goes out of office, the county authorities of London and the provinces are showing themselves eager and competent to give the children in their several areas the utmost benefit of the law as it stands. They are seeking to remove the reproach-to quote Matthew Arnold for the last time-that the schools in our country have been left to come forth as they could and to form themselves at haphazard, and are now, as a whole, in the most serious degree inadequate and unsatisfactory.'

If we were asked to describe in one word the whole tendency of English education as manifested at the present time, we should speak of a humanistic renaissance. Pater, a type of modern humanism, declares that 'the

real business of education' is insight, insight through culture into all that the present moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.' And in another place he writes:

:

'Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at that focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'

Between this definition of success and the ideal recommended to his son by the 'Self-made Merchant' of Mr Lorimer's clever 'Letters'—'you've got to eat hog, think hog, dream hog, in short, go the whole hog, if you're going to win out in the pork-packing business'—there is the whole difference between humanism and materialism. English education, we believe, is working round to the humanistic ideal.

'The school should humanise' (writes Mr Sadler). 'It should give to each of its scholars the chance of that development most congenial to his native powers. By humanising its pupils it can best serve the community which supports it.'

This tendency may be traced in the recent publications of the Board of Education; its spirit animates the work of the local committees throughout the country; and it may reasonably be hoped that this spirit will endure. The one thing needful now is to stimulate an interest in education, so that the national conscience may no longer tolerate a generation of elementary school teachers at once ill-trained and underpaid. The reaction has started at Whitehall; a sense of civic duty must do the rest,

Art. IX.-MATTHEW ARNOLD.

1. Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold. London and New York: Macmillan, 1891.

2. Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-1888. Collected and arranged by George W. E. Russell. Two vols. London and New York: Macmillan, 1895.

3. Matthew Arnold. By George Saintsbury. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1899.

4. Matthew Arnold. By H. W. Paul. London: Macmillan, 1902

5. Matthew Arnold. By G. W. E. Russell. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904.

6. Matthew Arnold, and his Relation to the Thought of our Time. By W. H. Dawson. New York and London: Putnam, 1904.

7. Two Essays upon Matthew Arnold; with some of his Letters to the Author. By Arthur Galton. London: Elkin Mathews, 1897.

8. The Bibliography of Matthew Arnold. Compiled and edited by T. B. Smart. London: Davy and Sons, 1892.

'Ah! two desires toss about

The poet's restless blood;

One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.'

For a celebrity to say nowadays that he will not permit his life to be written after his death is about as wise and about as effective as for him to say that he will not permit his portrait to be taken during his life. If the celebrity will not be taken sitting he will be 'stalked' or 'snap-shotted.' Some portrait of him for general use will be secured. It is the same with his biography. If he does not write his own story, or allow it to be written from authentic materials by friends, some 'Life' will be written, tant bien que mal, from such materials as can be reached by fair means or by other means. Tennyson, ‘a shy beast,' as he called himself, who disliked the idea as strongly as any one could, recognised the necessity and bowed to it, happily for himself and the world.

That Matthew Arnold should have objected to the process seems a little strange, for he was not at all shy,