What I regret most in this Bill is its retrograde tendency. We gave the parents of the children in 1870 the management of their own education, and now we are I saw a taking it away from them. letter in the papers the other day in which it was stated that the School Boards were inefficient because Tom, Dick, and Harry were elected; but it must be remembered that Tom, Dick, and Harry are the parents of the children. I do not wish to use the old familiar arguments against the squire and the parson ;

know what an enormous amount you can spend on petty expenses such as copy books and slate pencils. We all know that coal is cheap in summer and dear in winter, and under efficient management care is taken to buy at a favourable time, but managers will have no incentive to economy of that kind in future. These things may seem small, but if hon. Members do not think that small sums mount up to enormous totals let them look at the Vote for Stationery and Printing on which the State spends hundreds of thousands of pounds. I never knew a parson or a squire We, on the Public Accounts Committee, are examining the accounts of the South African War, and the House will be astonished to learn the waste of money on small items, such as damaged saddlery, rotten putties, condemned meat tins, mounting up to hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions. It will be the same with the schools. Take the case of a charwoman. A respectable widow is The engaged to look after a school. squire will give her half a ton of coals, and the parson will give her some soup, and some other kind person will pay her rent, while the Board will give her 3s. a week. But if this Bill becomes law, the local authority, which will consist of the parson, the squire, and the other kind person, will say, "We must give this poor respectable widow a better salary than 3s. a week; let us pay her 7s. 6d. a week; then she will be able to

pay for her
own coals and rent,
and do without the parson's soup."
And so the rates rise year after year.
The County Council can never exercise
control over these incidental expenses.
The only item they can control is the
salary of the teachers, and that is the
worst form of economy possible.
Sir Brampton Gurdon.

who was of the slightest use who had any
trouble whatever in getting elected on
to a School Board, or who did not wel-
come the assistance of their parishioners,
There is a
Tom, Dick, and Harry.
sub-section to Clause 12 which pro-
vides that the County Council may
over education to
hand
Parish
Councils. If that were done I should
not complain. We in small parishes
We
do not like the cumulative vote.
know that in the very large School Boards
the elections are carried on on religious
lines; but in our small country School
Boards we have no religious difficulty.
I have had the honour of being a Chair-
man of a large rural School Board, and
we have always had two Church of
England clergymen and the foremost
Nonconformists upon it, and we have
never had a dispute. My. hon. and
learned friend the Member for Warwick
stated that the education in towns is
good, in the country bad. I entirely
traverse the statement that the educa-
tion in rural parishes is bad. I believe it
is with some few exceptions excellent. I
knew my learned friend when he was 12
years old; he was just as amusing as he
is now; I never knew a boy with a

keener sense of humour; but as to high and the area of taxation. It is because I see no hope of the Bill being amended so as to give efficiency and economy that I am compelled to vote for the Amendment.

dry education, I believe I could produce boys from the parish schools who are just as well educated at twelve years of age as he was himself. Since that time he has had the advantage of an Eton education, the best in the world, and he has become an ornament to this House and to the Bar. I quite agree that in many cases the parish is too small an area, but, on the other hand, a union is too large an area. I should like to see the county divided into educational districts of from 1,000 to 2,000 population, the educational authority to consist of representatives from each Parish Council. There is no reason, of course, why, if there were five or six schools in the district area, one of them should not provide a higher grade education. I know that His Majesty's Government are sure to pass this Bill, but I am inclined to think that after it has been working for two or three years, and when the people find that their rates are increasing, and that the efficiency of the education is decreasing, the present Government will not carry a single county seat in East Anglia, except, perhaps, that of my hon. and gallant friend the Member for Chelmsford, who has given notice of an Amendment against the Bill. I shou d be sorry to miss my hon. friend om this House, as I have now taken part in a debate which so much showed the necessity of his short Speech, Rule, and as I wish to come within that Rule, I will only say that I view with great alarm the increase of expense, and what is still worse, the decrease of efficiency which I am sure will follow in rural schemes if representation is taken away, and if management is not co-incedent with we say. That is what is said for us;

(11.48.) MAJOR RASCH (Essex, Chelmsford): I am not a Chairman of a School Board, or a fanatic on higher education in the agricultural districts, and therefore I have not the right to address the House for three-quarters of done during the last few days. I am an an hour as so many hon. Members have agricultural Member, and am sent here by my constituents who, I think, pace the hon. Member for North Camberwell, are quite as intelligent as the voters in the Old Kent Road. Under the circumstances, I do not imagine that hon Members will expect me to build an opulent shrine to the First Lord of the Treasury. We are not grateful to him for scourging us with scorpions instead of with whips. I venture to say that in the agricultural districts we have no objection to education. We are as well able to talk platitudes about it as any hon. Member. What we resent very much is the statement made by an hon. Member of this House that we are Tony Lumpkins sheltering behind the President of the Council. We deny that. We do not object to education. We can stand a certain amount of it. We read a speech delivered at Bristol by the hon. Member for North Camberwell, in which he said that agricultural Members maintained that if all the money spent on education had been spent on artificial manures it would have been better for the country. Now that is not what

profit by it in after life. But the Government do not accept our advice, and are now likely to take away the only ewe lamb left in the Bill, and that is the

but we draw the line somewhere. We draw the line where education ceases to be of the slightest use to the children, and imposes a heavy burden on the rates. The common sense of the matter permissive clause. It is useless for an is that we know that large areas agricultural Member to speak against of land have gone out of cultivation the Bill, which, of course, will be carried in East Anglia in consequence of low by the enormous majority. Having prices and high taxes, and the First represented an agricultural district in Lord of the Treasury is going to South-East Essex for fourteen years, I impose an additional tax on the land of think I may consider myself as an something like £3,000,000 a year. What epitome and incarnation of agricultural is the sense of this megalomania for distress, but I am aware that nothing I teaching, in Shakesperian phrase, the can say will have much effect on the musical glasses to agricultural labourers' fortunes of the Bill, although I have my children and cramming them with vote against the Second Reading. The useless knowledge with the one hand, right hon. Gentleman has introduced and taking the bread and cheese out of their mouths with the other? What do hon. Members think of agricultural labourers' children? Do they imagine that when they leave school they turn into professors or Members of Parliament? They do not want your higher education; they do not want your curriculum, or whatever hon. Members choose to call it. I have my philosophic doubts as to whether it is possible to improve this Bill, because from my point of view, viz., that of the agricultural districts, the Bill is so bad that it cannot be improved. If the right hon. Gentleman had taken one or two agricultural Members of common sense into his confidence-I do not myself move in his exalted circles-I think he might have made a better job of it. What we agricultural Members want is to give security of tenure to the teacher; that secular education alone should be given in State-aided schools; and that the education imparted to agricultural children should be such that they would Major Rasch.

three education Bills. Two of them have
Lord
joined the majority, and, as
Curzon used to say, we may have an
intelligent anticipation of events before
they come off, and I hope and believe
that my anticipation in regard to this
third Bill will come off. I must say that
we do not object to education; what we
object to is placing the whole crushing
cost of it upon the rates. If the right
hon. Gentlemen were to put the expense
of education on the broad shoulders of

the Chancellor of the Exchequer, rustic
Members, as The Times calls them, would
not have much to say against the Second
Reading of this Bill.

ADJOURNMENT.

Motion made and Question, "That this House do now adjourn "-(Mr. Austen Chamberlain)—put, and agreed to.

Adjourned at five minutes before
Twelve o'clock.

An Asterisk (*) at the commencement of a Speech indicates revision by the Member.

As amended, considered; to be read The Land Drainage Act, 1861, relating the third time.

Petition from Bethnal Green, for will consider the advisability of issuing alteration; to lie upon the Table.

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR Petition from Amble, against; to lie INDIA (Lord G. HAMILTON, Middlesex, upon the Table.

Ealing): Under regulation, field batta is not given unless the service has been distinctly declared by the Government of

Petition from Heywood, in favour; to India to be field service for this purpose.

Petition from Pershore, against; to lie in the matter. the Table.

SALE OF INTOXICATING LIQUORS ON
SUNDAY BILL.

Petitions in favour: From Hanley and Burslem; Coventry; New Hirst; Flimby; Grenonside; Hirst; Liskeard; London; Sheffield; Leeds; Ramsbottom; Kensington (two); and, Whitehaven (two); to lie upon the Table.