614 TRANSACTIONS OP SECTION L. 



ance at such schools compulsory would be to run a serious risk of over-pressure. 

 It is probable that sympathetic co-operation between local education authorities 

 and the employers of labour in the locality will in this matter afford the best 

 hope of success. For it is to the interest of the employers themselves that their 

 employees should not cease to improve themselves in knowledge as soon as they 

 leave the elementary schools. 



The need of the local education authority for increased financial help out of 

 public funds was recognised, I think, in Parliament during the debates on the 

 last Education Bill. The State cannot make fresh demands upon the education 

 authorities without granting them fresh funds. Yet there can be little doubt 

 that the feeding of necessitous children and the care of the epileptic, feeble- 

 minded, and crippled children will soon or late become duties imposed by 

 Parliament on all local education authorities. 



Lastly, the connection between the elementary school and the university or the 

 technical school should be made complete. At present the elementary school 

 provides education for children up to their fifteenth year. The university or 

 the technical school does not admit pupils under sixteen years. But education, 

 when it is once, broken, is hard to resume. The educational system, if it is to be 

 efficacious, must be continuous. 



Upon the difficult and delicate subject of religious teaching in elementary 

 schools I have so far scrupulously refrained from touching, ft would not, I 

 think, become me to make more than these two remarks : — 



1. That religion is in the long run the most potent support of morality; 

 religious teaching is, therefore, a necessary element in every sound educational 

 system; and any religious teaching, if it be but the belief in an Almighty 

 Power, is far better than Secularism or Paganism. But it is the State alone — ■ 

 not any Church or religious body, but the State alone — which can ensure the 

 attendance of all children at religious teaching, subject of course to exemption 

 on conscientious grounds. 



2. That if it is or may be held to be the interest of the several Churches 

 to educate their children in watertight compartments, so that no child shall 

 come in religious contact with any child not of the same creed as 

 his own, that is not at all the interest of the State. The State needs that its 

 citizens shall have learnt to know and respect each other in spite of religious 

 differences, to rub shoulders together, and to co-operate with each other for 

 the public good. It needs citizens who are capable of judging even religious 

 questions not without reference to the welfare of the body politic. It is pro- 

 bable therefore, and I cannot say it is unreasonable, that the State, while freely 

 allowing the different religious bodies, if they are able and willing, to provide 

 for the religious education of their own children, will require some mitigation 

 of religious differences in the schools supported out of the public exchequer or 

 out of the local rates. 



A public elementary system of education then must be complete in itself, 

 so far as it prepares children physically, intellectually, and morally for the affairs 

 of life. But it must not lose sight of the possibility that some, and those the 

 most promising, of the children educated in elementary schools will deserve 

 to rise to a higher than an elementary educational standard. 



It is probable that the ascent of pupils from one class of school to another 

 will become more usual in future years. This ascent will be effected or facili- 

 tated, as to some extent it already is, by the provision of free places, bursaries, 

 exhibitions, and scholarships. Even now boys educated in elementary schools 

 have attained the highest honours in the ancient as well as in the modern 

 universities. Some such boys have won admission to the public schools, and 

 among these schools to boarding schools as well as to day schools. Whatever 

 amount of social exclusiveness may still apparently linger in that most truly 

 democratical of English institutions, a public school, it seems to me impossible 

 that in a democratical age there should ultimately remain any school which 

 will not open its doors to pupils who are drawn from every social section of 

 the community. In the education of girls, the schools of the Girls' Public 

 Day School Company and other similar schools, whether publicly or privately 

 governed, have done much to mitigate, if not to dissipate, the social differences 

 among girls living in the same locality. 



But the agencies by which children of comparatively poor parents have in 



