2 70 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ecclesiastical law. An act of 1714 exempted elementary schools from 

 the penalties of the conformity legislation, and so such schools could, 

 if they would, multiply. The opportunity for a great movement was 

 at hand: the question for England, perhaps the question for civiliza- 

 tion, was, would it be seized? To attempt to deal in any detail with 

 the manner in which this opportunity, emerging so obscurely among 

 the bitter political conflicts of the time, was seized, is beyond the scope 

 of a review article,* but I may indicate some broad aspects of the 

 movement. 



First, we must remember that the modern system, though it in- 

 cludes now all the endowed educational foundations that had fallen 

 on to evil days at the end of the seventeenth century, did not in any 

 sense spring from those old foundations. It was not till the middle 

 of the nineteenth century that the abuses in these foundations were 

 remedied. "Whoever will examine," said Lord Kenyon in 1795, 

 "the state of the grammar schools in different parts of this kingdom 

 will see to what a lamentable condition most of them are reduced. 

 * * * empty walls without scholars, and everything neglected but 

 the receipt of the salaries and emoluments." The state of the Court 

 of Chancery was such that it would have ruined any individual as 

 well as the endowment to have brought almost any specific case before 

 the courts. These foundations lay dormant till better days — till the 

 days of the grammar school act of 1840 and the endowed schools act 

 of 1869. It may be stated generally that it was not until after 1870 

 that the ancient grammar schools and endowed schools — the numerous 

 secondary schools of the country which are now proving of such vast 

 importance in coordination with the state-aided primary system — ^be- 

 came in any sense efficient. Yet we have to look to a certain class of 

 endowed schools for one source of the modern elementary system. 

 In England and Wales there were in 1842 some 3,000 endowed schools 

 and of these more than 1,000 were founded between the years 1660 

 and 1730. This extraordinary movement, which has left so vast a 

 result, is certainly difficult to understand. About the year 1660 

 church and state had practically suppressed endowed education, and 

 yet in the face of that suppression a huge endowment movement arose. 

 One explanation is certainly Bates's case, which decided in 1670 that 

 a schoolmaster presented by the founder of a school or by a lay patron 

 could not be ejected from his office by reason of his not holding the 

 bishop's license. This case was a direct incentive to all dissenters, 

 and to all who hated the Erastianity of the period, to found schools 

 where children could be safely educated. This appears to be a reason- 

 able explanation of a movement which was as remarkable as it has 

 been unnoticed by historians,- This explanation finds support in the 



* I have dealt with it at some length in my volume on ' State Intervention 

 in English Education,' published last year by the Cambridge University Press. 



