In the towns, the school boards have done yeoman service in the cause of popular education. Yet it is obvious we cannot allow two public bodies, each professing to do the same kind of educational work, to remain in perpetual competition with one another. From the national point of view there is no gain whatever from such a clumsy and expensive duplication. It can mean only the perpetuation of the educational schism which has hitherto divided the nation. To leave the county councils with only the control of the present grammar school is to narrow their conception of what secondary education really means, and another ten years of the present régime may make them into partisans despite themselves. At present, both in theory and practice, they are really far more democratic than the existing school board. They are elected on the ordinary and not the cumulative franchise, while the number of votes cast at the borough-council election in the towns is always much larger than that cast at the school-board election. Thus in London at the last county-council election about 70 per cent. went to the hall, while the last school-board election barely interested 20 per cent. of the electorate.

Yet, if the county councils are to absorb the school boards in the town, the transference must be very carefully and gradually made. These latter bodies have acquired a wealth of administrative and educational experience which it would be hard, if not impossible, to replace immediately. There must be no forced liquidation, but they must be taken over as going concerns, their best members being co-opted at once on the borough council education committee, in order that the break in continuity may be as little as possible.

The following advantages, from the national point of view, which would result from the adoption of the county council as the one local authority, should also be noted:

With a single authority in each area, controlling all forms of education, it will be at once possible to detect and correct overlapping, and supplement any deficiencies in educational supply. Again, the needs of each locality necessarily vary. The single authority, more or less supreme in its own area, will be able readily to see at a glance the needs of its district and to call for them accordingly. There is plenty of work and more than enough for the existing type of schools. What is wanted is to regulate and define more carefully the function of each so they may be as readily understood by the people as they are in France or Switzerland. Half the want of interest in the schools which exist today in England is due to the impossibility for the ordinary man to make out what they severally stand for. People cannot be enthusiastic about their schools till they comprehend their exact aims. If we cannot harness the Niagara of national interest in education to our schools, as you have done in America, we can yet do a great deal in the way of deriving power by hitching the school on to the latent forces that lie at the back of local patriotism in England.

Coming now to the question of the central authority, it is enough to say that primary education was originally under the education department, which, like many other departments of state, was at first an appanage of the privy council. The latter is the real source of an unexhausted executive power in England, and may be compared to the sun in its potentiality to throw off some new department of state when a new administrative want makes itself felt.

Science and art teaching, which dates back to the great exhibition of 1851, was under the science and art department, which was later on made the authority for technical education. The endowed schools were controlled by the charity commission, whose oversight, however, was mainly financial. The present board of education was evolved out of the two above-named departments, with power to take over certain functions from the charity commission. The new office was divided up into two sections, primary and secondary, and technological. The latter section shows sign of splitting up into two parts, so that there will probably in the end be three sections in the office. Hitherto, owing to the miserable system of payment by results, the office has been overwhelmed by questions of detail and audit. The establishment of the block grant may perhaps set it free to study the admirable collection of reports which have been amassed by its special inquiries section, in order to enable it to frame general principles of control. It has also been furnished with a consultative committee of experts; these no doubt should serve as an admirable go-between in their dealings with the schools on their pedagogical side; but what they really most require at the present time is an efficient secondary inspectorate that shall serve, not only as the mouthpiece, but the eyes and ears, of the board. Otherwise they will be like those lay figures that have eyes, but see not; ears have they, but they hear not. Much, again, of their routine work should be delegated to the local authorities.

The true function of the board of education seems to be something of a mean between your bureau of education and the strong centralized ministry of public instruction in France. I cannot define this function in better words than those of our greatest writer on education, Mr. Michael Sadler. He is speaking of the part of the state in national education, and, after dismissing the individualist idea that the state. should have no part in national education, and rejecting Adam Smith's opinion that it should provide only primary schools, and Mills' view that it should establish a system of schools of its own among other competing systems, he goes on to lay down that the state should rather draw toward itself, inspire, stimulate, and (when needful) aid each and every type and instance of efficient and needed schools, while absorbing, controlling, crushing none; aiming, not at monopoly, but at a comprehensive federation of schools and colleges; at strengthening educational

freedom, not at any restriction of it; at self-criticism, not at the discouragement of criticism; at the planning and record of careful and systematic experiments; at the very liberal encouragement of educational, psychological, and hygienic research of all kinds, in all types of schools, and those not in England alone; at the wide diffusion among all concerned of the accurate, but varied and outspoken, observations thus secured, with a view to the development and guidance of a well-informed and skillfully observant public and professional opinion.

Such seems to me to be the present position of English education and its principal shortcomings; and, in speaking so plainly of our failings, I do not wish you to imagine for a moment there is little to be said in praise of English education. My abstention was rather intentional, because it seemed to me scarcely the place to say it; and yet, as one reared in the traditions of our English public schools, who has breathed their subtle atmosphere, as strong and life-giving in its way as that of your American schools; who later on, as a teacher, has attempted to maintain and spread their high-soaring and deep-rooted traditions, I feel it is only fair tonight to express in public my eternal gratitude toward those public institutions which instilled into me, unforward scholar that I was, some scanty sense of the high ideals of patriotism; of esprit de corps and of serving the state, of noblesse oblige and the non-existence of rights. unaccompanied by duties; of the virtue of self-control; of the spirit of never-say-die; of the belief in fair play and other national qualities which belong pre-eminently to the Anglo-Saxon race. And if I also look on France as a sort of foster-mother who, taking me late in life, deepened my ideas of culture and philosophy, it is because she gave me thereby a sort of intellectuelle Anschauung into the 0os of English public-school life, and helped me better to understand myself and my great debt to these ancient and religious .foundations. I might also point with pride to the work of the great school boards, like those of Leeds and London, to show what thirty years of popular effort have done for the working classes, or extol the energy of the technical-education board for London, which in ten years has literally created the present network of technical education out of nothing.

But my object is not to praise or blame our national education, but to render it intelligible. I greatly fear, however, I have not infrequently been obscure, owing to the lack of time to set forth each proposition and idea in its due light and proportion. If I have failed, I shall at least have had the melancholy satisfaction of making you realize the extraordinary complexity of the problem by explaining the obscureness per obscureness.

There are, however, two ideas which I would wish you to carry away with you. One, that a trim and geometrical system of education is probably impossible in England, not because of the stupidity or indif ference of the English people, but because of the diversity that exists in

the national character, and the extraordinary sensitiveness of the English people to fundamentals, about which they rarely argue, but which, as the suppressed premise, give weight and direction to their arguments. think no nation feels more deeply, or experiences greater difficulty in putting its feelings into words. I fancy at times it even half-consciously shrinks from doing so.

The second is that any satisfactory settlement of the education question, or even temporary modus vivendi, must recognize this diversity in the national character and give fair play to the various sets of opposing tendencies which are not always symmetrically ranged under one banner or party, yet are ever carrying on a perpetual duel in England, as prefigured by the battle between freedom and authority, between the spirit. of inquiry and that of obedience, between individual liberty and state control, between private effort and corporate life, between the ethical and the intellectual conceptions of education.

This English duality, which Emerson himself has remarked upon, makes us appear at times strangely undecided, irresolute, illogical, and cross-grained; but there are moments when, as Pascal says, the heart has reasons, the head knows not.

Yet I do not wish to imply that we should be forever halting between two opinions, and that there are not occasions when we must make up our minds to take a decided step. No one is more convinced than myself at the present time that we have need of overhauling the ship of state and putting her into a better state of repair, making jettison of certain of the laissez-faire notions with which we are encumbered and taking in a fresh consignment of state control. I only ask you to judge us gently. Our responsibilities are indeed great, yet I have no doubt. whatever, once we have truly realized them, we shall prove fully equal to the task. For my part I cannot entertain the idea that the Anglo-Saxon race, whether on this side of the Atlantic or the other, can ever go under.

THE FUNCTIONS OF A UNIVERSITY IN A PROSPEROUS

DEMOCRACY

CHARLES F. THWING, PRESIDENT OF WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY AND

ADELBERT COLLEGE, CLEVELAND, O.

There is one special respect in which the university proves to be of great advantage to organized religion. The university helps to show to the world the relative worth of the church and the relative lack of the worth of churches. The church is founded upon the primary belief of the existence of a personal God, and upon the derived belief that the will of this Being is made known to the will of man, and also upon the

derived belief that the will of this Supreme Being is to be obeyed by man. Churches are founded upon some adaptation of application or corollary of this fundamental conception. The university is concerned with truth in large relations. It therefore investigates and presents the primary conception on which the church rests. It therefore is an aid to the support of the church in a democratic community. But its relations to the divisions of the one great church are on the whole remote. For cisms it has not only contempt, but also indifference; for heresy, while it may give approval to the motives of the heretic, it has only indifference. The little truths which one endeavors to correlate and to transinute into the system of orthodoxy usually seem to it slight and unimportant. The larger, therefore, a university becomes, the less significant do its denominational and sectarian relations appear. A sectarian university is a misnomer. The larger and stronger a university becomes, the more impressive and stronger becomes its allegiance to the fundamental doctrines of religion. For these are fundamental truths of being. A sectarian university would be a practical impossibility, as an irreligious university is a logical inconsistency. These truths receive illustration in the changes which have occurred in the universities of every order, and also in the enlarging policy of the oldest colleges of America.

It is also to be noted that theology, studied broadly, as it ever should be, becomes, when studied subjectively, psychology, and when studied objectively it becomes either anthropology or biology. Such a broad study of theology the university is, of all institutions and agencies, the best fitted to conduct. The school of theology is in peril of being a school of theology only. The results of such a narrow method cannot but be slight. For, valuing at the utmost the content of all special revelations from and concerning the Divine Being, these revelations are so slight in comparison to the whole content of truth respecting God and his will that advantage must be taken of psychology and anthropology and biology for learning whatever can be known touching Him who is all and in all.

In the promotion of social efficiency the university adjusts itself in best ways to the growth of that ever-growing force, the sense of humanity. It is significant that the growth of the sense of humanity has been specially vigorous in the forty years that have elapsed since the publication of The Origin of the Species. As it has become evident that man has arisen out of the lower forms of life, the worth of humanity, the highest form, has been more appreciated, and the sense of the oneness of this present highest form been the more clearly harmonized. This problem of recognition and appreciation the university is set to promote. It has been and is an agency and a condition best fitted and qualified to promote the growth of this sense of humanity. Thru the interpretation of human movements, and thru a sense of love for all men and a