PUBLIC EDUCATION, &c. &c. CHAPTER I. A REVIEW OF PARTIES. THE establishment of a system of national education is so connected with the earliest traditions of ecclesiastical authority, and with the struggles for religious and civil freedom which have caused two of the most memorable revolutions in our history; and is so interwoven with the results of the voluntary efforts of religious zeal in the last century, that no plan for its promotion worthy of a statesman has been proposed to Parliament, without exciting vehement controversy. The existence of Lord Melbourne's administration was endangered in 1839 by the attempt to lay the foundations of the education of the people, on the recognition of the equality of their civil rights in matters of religion. The Church was probably less alarmed by the recognition of this civil equality, than by the absence from that scheme of any definition of the limits of the civil power. Such definition was then impossible, but its absence aroused the most extravagant terror. Impelled by this fear, the Church, in the defence of her traditional privileges, assumed the responsibility of resisting, by the utmost exercise 4 The Committee of Privy Council established in 1839. of her authority and influence in the country, in both Houses of Parliament, and at the foot of the Throne, the first great plan ever proposed, by any government, for the education of the humblest classes in Great Britain. The statesmen who sustained this grave discomfiture were not, however, discouraged. They failed indeed to establish a normal school, under the direction of the civil power, for training in religion and secular learning the teachers of the poor. The scheme of the normal school was the most direct mode of asserting the emancipation of the common school, from the surviving claims for a purely priestly control. It repudiated the canon of 1603, never binding on the laity, which declared that the schoolmaster should be licensed by the ordinary. It asserted the supremacy of the civil power in popular education, in order that it might invoke the aid of the laity, and secure to parents and scholars the rights of conscience. It offered to all religious denominations a recognition of the equality of their civil rights, while it claimed their aid, to elevate to the enjoyment of their rights and the discharge of their duties, as christians and citizens, those classes which were degraded by ignorance, not only below the range of the electoral franchise, but, too often below the beneficial influence of the public ministrations of religion. But the Committee of Privy Council survived, when the design of the normal school, which incorporated these principles, was abandoned. It has ever been the chief honour of that department, that its opponents have, at all times, endeavoured to excite apprehension of the earnestness with which the civil power would be exerted by it, to deliver the weak from the thraldom of ignorance; of the fidelity, with which it would guard the rights of conscience, especially among the poor and defenceless; of the zeal, with which it would vindicate the It encounters Successive Embarrassments. 5 rights of the laity; and of the prominence, which it would give to the secular education of the people, while it took care that the "youth of this country should be religiously brought up." Under the fostering care of this Committee, public education gradually improved and expanded, until in 1842, the Government of Sir Robert Peel again awakened controversy, by laying before Parliament the Education Clauses of the Factories' Regulation Bill. The plan proposed in 1839 had been based on the recognition of the equality of civil rights among religious Communions. Warned by the successful resistance of the Church to that scheme, Sir James Graham founded his measure on the existing state of the law, as to the toleration of diversities of religious belief. While, however, the Church had not hesitated to prevent the adoption of a plan of public education, by refusing to accept any scheme based on religious equality, the various denominations of Dissent were not less earnest in repudiating one, in which such equality was not fully recognised. Doubtless the principles at stake were momentous. The crisis, both to the Church and to the Dissidents from her communion, was one, by which the history of religion in this country could not fail to be gravely affected. A conviction of the vastness of these issues must have been required, to enable any earnest man, who had a clear insight into the spiritual and temporal wants of the labouring classes, to refuse to them the Bread of Life. Yet earnest men both in the Church and out of it did not hesitate. The Church firmly refused to relinquish her supremacy in matters of religion. The Dissidents sternly rejected her ascendency. The people remained with feeble and inefficient means of instruction, or were abandoned to absolute neglect and ignorance, with all its fatal consequences. In the interval between 1842 and 1846, Sir Robert Peel's Government cautiously extended the adminis |