XV THE SCHOOL BOARDS 381 



I confess I should have thought it my duty to 

 reject any such suggestion, as dishonouring to 

 a number of worthy persons, if it had not been for 

 a leading article and some correspondence which 

 appeared in the Guardian of November 9th, 

 1870. 



The Guardian 'is, as everybody knows, one of 

 the best of the " religious " newspapers ; and, 

 personally, I have every reason to speak highly of 

 the fairness, and indeed kindness, with which the 

 editor is good enough to deal with a writer who 

 must, in many ways, be so objectionable to him as 

 myself. I quote the following passages from a 

 leading article on a letter of mine, therefore, with 

 all respect, and with a genuine conviction that the 

 course of conduct advocated by the writer must 

 appear to him in a very different light from that 

 under which I see it : 



"The first of these points is the interpretation which Professor 

 Huxley puts on the ' Cowper-Temple clause.' It is, in fact, 

 that which we foretold some time ago as likely to be forced 

 upon it by those who think with him. The clause itself was 

 one of those compromises which it is very difficult to define or 

 to maintain logically. On the one side was the simple freedom 

 to School Boards to establish what schools they pleased, which 

 Mr. Forster originally gave, but against which the Nonconform- 

 ists lifted up their voices, because they conceived it likely to 

 give too much power to the Church. On the other side there 

 was the proposition to make the schools secular intelligible 

 enough, but in the consideration of public opinion simply im- 

 possible and there was the vague impracticable idea, which 

 Mr. Gladstone thoroughly tore to pieces, of enacting that the 



