TEE STORY OF ENGLISH EDUCATION. 269 



of national education. Local rates in aid of education existed in rare 

 and sporadic cases, perhaps a century earlier than this; while it is 

 interesting to note that in the colony of ]\Iassachusetts Bay as early as 

 October 25, 1644, the general court granted a voluntary rate for the 

 maintenance of poor scholars at Harvard College, and the Connecticut 

 code of 1650 dealt with the whole question of rate-aided education. 

 It is also well to remember that while this beginning of state 

 and rate aid had almost died away in England before the beginning 

 of the eighteenth century, yet the English crown in 1695 confirmed 

 a New England statute creating a system of rate-aided education. 

 The idea, however, soon vanished as completely in the American col- 

 onies as it did in the mother country. The restoration of Charles II. 

 in 1660 sounded indeed the death note of the commonwealth con- 

 ception of national education. It achieved as well an even more 

 lamentable result, for it reduced the great Elizabethan system to 

 a state of coma. Elizabeth, we have seen, insisted on religious con- 

 formity, but she did not allow this to interfere with her educational 

 policy. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 and the Five Mile Act of 

 1665 seem to us to have been literally designed for the extinction 

 of education. These acts involved such a peering into the lives 

 of schoolmasters, such a course of inquisitorial folly, that the posi- 

 tion became intolerable. Men would not become schoolmasters, 

 and practically all secondary and (apart from a certain new move- 

 ment to be referred to immediately) primary education ceased to 

 exist. Education has no meaning when none but political and 

 religious hypocrites are allowed to teach. The campaign against 

 dissent and Eoman Catholicism may possibly be defended on political 

 grounds, but, from the point of view of national education, the result 

 was lamentable. For the third time national education had been de- 

 stroyed ; it seemed hopeless to try and evolve a fourth system. 



That fourth system, incorporating much of the wrecked materials 

 of the old systems, is receiving its coping-stone to-day. We must, there- 

 fore, briefly trace its growth. The Uniformity legislation that fol- 

 lowed the Restoration was so severe in character that a reaction or a 

 revolt from its operation was inevitable. The decisions of the courts of 

 justice were the first sign of this reaction. The courts held that a school- 

 master, if he was a nominee of the founder or of the lay-patron of a 

 school, could not be ejected from the school for teaching without the 

 bishop's license {Bates's case, 1670) ; while it was decided in Cox's case 

 in 1700 that there was not and never had been ecclesiastical control over 

 any schools save grammar schools; that the church, in fact, had no 

 control over elementary education. In Douse' s case, decided in 1701, 

 it was held that it was not a civil offence to keep an elementary school 

 without the bishop's license. Hence the elementary school could 

 escape the inquisition of the bishop whether imposed by statute or 



