The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II Part 26

The problem of education might have seemed the very simplest. After the extension of the franchise to the workmen, everybody felt, in a happy phrase of that time, that "we must educate our masters." Outside events were supposed to hold a lesson. The triumphant North in America was the land of the common school. The victory of Prussians over Austrians at Sadowa in 1866 was called the victory of the elementary school teacher.

Even the nonconformists had come round. Up to the middle of the sixties opinion among them was hostile to the intervention of the state in education. They had resisted Graham's proposals in 1843, and Lord John Russell's in 1847; but a younger generation, eager for progress, saw the new necessity that change of social and political circ.u.mstance imposed.

The business in 1870 was to provide schools, and to get the children into them.(191)

It is surprising how little serious attention had been paid even by speculative writers in this country to the vast problem of the relative duties of the State and the Family in respect of education. Mill devoted a few keen pages to it in his book upon political economy. Fawcett, without much of Mill's intellectual power or any of his sensitive temperament, was supposed to represent his principles in parliament; yet in education he was against free schools, while Mill was for them. All was unsettled; important things were even unperceived. Yet the questions of national education, answer them as we will, touch the moral life and death of nations. The honourable zeal of the churches had done something, but most of the ground remained to be covered. The question was whether the system about to be created should merely supplement those sectarian, private, voluntary schools, or should erect a fabric worthy of the high name of national. The churchman hoped, but did not expect, the first. The nonconformist (broadly speaking), the academic liberal, and the hard-grit radical, were keen for the second, and they were all three well represented in the House of Commons.

(M94) What the government proposed was that local boards should be called into existence to provide schools where provision was inadequate and inefficient, these schools to be supported by the pence of the children, the earned grant from parliament, and a new rate to be levied upon the locality. The rate was the critical element. If the boards chose, they could make bye-laws compelling parents to send their children to school; and they could (with a conscience clause) settle what form of religious instruction they pleased. The voluntary men were to have a year of grace in which to make good any deficiency in supply of schools, and so keep out the boards. The second reading was secured without a division, but only on a.s.surances from Mr. Gladstone that amendments would be made in committee.

On June 16, the prime minister, as he says, "explained the plans of the government to an eager and agitated house."

Two days before, the cabinet had embarked upon a course that made the agitation still more eager. Mr. Gladstone wrote the pregnant entry: "_June 14._ Cabinet; decided on making more general use of machinery supplied by voluntary schools, avoidance of religious controversy in local boards."

This meant that the new system was in no way to supersede the old non-system, but to supplement it. The decision was fatal to a national settlement. As Mr. Forster put it, their object was "to complete the voluntary system and to fill up gaps." Lord Ripon used the same language in the Lords. Instead of the school boards being universal, they should only come into existence where the ecclesiastical party was not strong enough in wealth, influence, and liberality to keep them out. Instead of compulsory attendance being universal, that principle could only be applied where a school board was found, and where the school board liked to apply it. The old parliamentary grant to the denominational schools was to be doubled. This last provision was Mr. Gladstone's own. Forster had told him that it was impossible to carry a proposal allowing school boards to contribute to denominational schools, and the only compensation open was a larger slice of the grant from parliament.

III

The storm at once began to rage around the helmsman's ears. Some days earlier the situation had been defined by Mr. Brand, the whip, for his leader's guidance. The attempt, he said, made by Fawcett, Dilke, and others, to create a diversion in favour of exclusively secular education has signally failed; the opinion of the country is clearly adverse. On the other hand, while insisting on the religious element, the country is just as strongly opposed to dogmatic teaching in schools aided by local rates.

"You ask me," said Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Brand (May 24), "to solve the problem in the words 'to include religion, and to exclude dogma,' which, as far as I know, though it admits of a sufficient practical handling by individuals acting for themselves, has not yet been solved by any state or parliament." Well might he report at Windsor (June 21) that, though the auspices were favourable, there was a great deal of crude and indeterminate opinion on the subject in the House as well as elsewhere, and "the bill, if carried, would be carried by the authority and persistence of the government, aided by the acquiescence of the opposition." It was this carrying of the bill by the aid of the tory opposition that gave fuel to the liberal flame, and the increase of the grant to the sectarian schools made the heat more intense. The most critical point of the bill, according to Mr. Gladstone, was a proposal that now seems singularly worded, to the effect that the teaching of scriptures in rate schools should not be in favour of, or opposed to, tenets of any denomination. This was beaten by 251 to 130. "The minority was liberal, but more than half of the liberal party present voted in the majority."

(M95) "We respect Mr. Forster," cried Dale of Birmingham, "we honour Mr.

Gladstone, but we are determined that England shall not again be cursed with the bitterness and strife from which we had hoped that we had for ever escaped, by the abolition of the church rate."(192) Writing to a brother nonconformist, he expresses his almost unbounded admiration for Mr. Gladstone, "but it is a bitter disappointment that his government should be erecting new difficulties in the way of religious equality."

Under the flashing eye of the prime minister himself the nonconformist revolt reared its crest. Miall, the veteran bearer of the flag of disestablishment, told Mr. Gladstone (July 22) that he was leading one section of the liberal party through the valley of humiliation. "Once bit, twice shy. We can't stand this sort of thing much longer," he said. In a flame of natural wrath Mr. Gladstone replied that he had laboured not to gain Mr. Miall's support, but to promote the welfare of the country. "I hope my hon. friend will not continue his support to the government one moment longer than he deems it consistent with his sense of right and duty. For G.o.d's sake, sir, let him withdraw it the moment he thinks it better for the cause he has at heart that he should do so." The government, he said, had striven to smooth difficulties, to allay pa.s.sions, to avoid everything that would excite or stimulate, to endeavour to bring men to work together, to rise above mere sectional views, to eschew all extremes, and not to make their own narrow choice the model of the measure they were presenting to parliament, but to admit freely and liberally into its composition those great influences which were found swaying the community. Forster wrote to a friend, "it does not rest with me now whether or no the state should decree against religion-decree that it is a thing of no account. Well, with my a.s.sent the state shall not do this, and I believe I can prevent it."(193) Insist, forsooth, that religion was not a thing of no account against men like Dale, one of the most ardent and instructed believers that ever fought the fight and kept the faith; against Bright, than whom no devouter spirit breathed, and who thought the Education Act "the worst Act pa.s.sed by any liberal parliament since 1832."

The opposition did not show deep grat.i.tude, having secured as many favours as they could hope, and more than they had antic.i.p.ated. A proposal from the government (July 14) to introduce secret voting in the election of local boards was stubbornly contested, in spite, says Mr. Gladstone, "of the unvarying good temper, signal ability and conciliatory spirit of Mr.

Forster," and it was not until after fourteen divisions that a few a.s.suaging words from Mr. Gladstone brought the handful of conservative opposition to reason. It was five o'clock before the unflagging prime minister found his way homewards in the broad daylight.

It is impossible to imagine a question on which in a free government it was more essential to carry public opinion with the law. To force parents to send children to school, was an enterprise that must break down if opinion would not help to work it. Yet probably on no other question in Mr. Gladstone's career as law-maker was common opinion so hard to weigh, to test, to focus and adjust. Of the final settlement of the question of religious instruction, Mr. Gladstone said to Lord Lyttelton when the battle was over (Oct. 25, '70):-

... I will only say that it was in no sense my choice or that of the government. Our first proposition was by far the best. But it received no active support even from the church, the National Society, or the opposition, while divers bishops, large bodies of clergy, the Education Union, and earliest of all, I think, Roundell Palmer in the House of Commons, threw overboard the catechism. We might then have fallen back upon the plan of confining the application of the rate to secular subjects; but this was opposed by the church, the opposition, most of the dissenters, and most of our own friends. As it was, I a.s.sure you, the very utmost that could be done was to arrange the matter as it now stands, where the exclusion is limited to the formulary, and to get rid of the popular imposture of undenominational instruction.

(M96) At bottom the battle of the schools was not educational, it was social. It was not religious but ecclesiastical, and that is often the very contrary of religious. In the conflicts of the old centuries whence Christian creeds emerged, disputes on dogma constantly sprang from rivalries of race and accidents of geography. So now quarrels about education and catechism and conscience masked the standing jealousy between church and chapel-the unwholesome fruit of the historic mishaps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that separated the nation into two camps, and invested one of them with all the pomp and privilege of social ascendency. The parent and the child, in whose name the struggle raged, stood indifferent. From the point of party strategy, the policy of this great statute was fatal. The church of England was quickened into active antagonism by Irish disestablishment, by the extinction of sectarian tests at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the treatment of endowed schools. This might have been balanced by the zeal of nonconformists. Instead of zeal, the Education Act produced refrigeration and estrangement.

We may be sure that on such a subject Mr. Gladstone looked further than strategies of party. "I own to you," said he to a correspondent before the battle was quite over, "that the history of these last few months leaves upon my mind some melancholy impressions, which I hope at some fancied period of future leisure and retirement to study and interpret." He soon saw how deep the questions went, and on what difficult ground the state and the nation would be inevitably drawn. His notions of a distinctive formula were curious. Forster seems to have put some question to him on the point whether the three creeds were formularies within the Act. It appears to me, Mr. Gladstone answered (October 17, 1870):-

It is quite open to you at once to dispose of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and to decline inquiring whether they are distinctive, upon the ground that they are not doc.u.ments employed in the instruction of young children.... Obviously no one has a right to call on you to define the distinctive character of a formulary such as the Thirty-nine Articles, or of any but such as are employed in schools. With respect to the Apostles' Creed, it appears to me not to be a distinctive formulary in the sense of the Act. Besides the fact that it is acknowledged by the great bulk of all Christendom, it is denied or rejected by no portion of the Christian community; and, further, it is not controversial in its form, but sets forth, in the simplest shape a series of the leading facts on which Christianity, the least abstract of all religions, is based.

Manning plied him hard (September, October, November, 1871). The state of Paris (Commune blazing that year, Tuileries and Hotel de Ville in ashes, and the Prussian spiked helmets at the gates) was traceable to a G.o.dless education-so the archbishop argued. In England the Christian tradition was unbroken. It was only a clique of doctrinaires, Huxley at the head of them, who believing nothing trumpeted secular education. "Delighted to see Mr. Forster attacked as playing into the hands of the clergy." Mr.

Gladstone should stimulate by every agency in his power the voluntary religious energies of the three kingdoms. "The real crisis is in the formation of men. They are as we make them, and they make society. The formation of men is the work you have given to the school boards. G.o.d gave it to the parents. Neither you nor Mr. Forster meant this; you least of all men on your side of the House. Glad to see you lay down the broad and intelligible line that state grants go to secular education, and voluntary efforts must do the rest. Let us all start fair in this race. Let every sect, even the Huxleyites, have their grant if they fulfil the conditions.

As for the school-rate conscience, it is a mongrel inst.i.tution of quakerism." How Mr. Gladstone replied on all these searching issues, I do not find.

IV

The pa.s.sing of the Act did not heal the wound. The nonconformist revolt was supported in a great conference at Manchester in 1872, representing eight hundred churches and other organizations. Baptist unions and congregational unions were unrelenting. We may as well finish the story.

It was in connection with this struggle that Mr. Chamberlain first came prominently into the arena of public life-bold, intrepid, imbued with the keen spirit of political nonconformity, and a born tactician. The issue selected for the attack was the twenty-fifth section of the Education Act, enabling school boards to pay in denominational schools the fees of parents who, though not paupers, were unable to pay them. This provision suddenly swelled into dimensions of enormity hitherto unsuspected. A caustic onlooker observed that it was the smallest ditch in which two great political armies ever engaged in civil war. Yet the possibility under cover of this section, of a sectarian board subsidising church schools was plain, and some cases, though not many, actually occurred in which appreciable sums were so handed over. The twenty-fifth section was a real error, and it made no bad flag for an a.s.sault upon a scheme of error.

(M97) Great things were hoped from Mr. Bright's return to the government in the autumn of 1873. The correspondence between Mr. Gladstone and him sheds some interesting light upon the state into which the Education Act, and Mr. Forster's intractable bearing in defence of it, had brought important sections of the party:-

_Mr. Bright to Mr. Gladstone._

_Aug. 12, 1873._-So far as I can hear, there is no intention to get up an opposition at Birmingham, which is a comfort, as I am not in force to fight a contested election. I am anxious not to go to the election, fearing that I shall not have nerve to speak to the 5000 men who will or may crowd the town hall. Before I go, if I go, I shall want to consult you on the difficult matter-how to deal frankly and wisely with the education question. I cannot break with my "noncon." friends, the political friends of all my life; and unless my joining you can do something to lessen the mischief now existing and _still growing_, I had better remain as I have been since my illness, a spectator rather than an actor on the political field.... I hope you are better, and that your troubles, for a time, are diminished. I wish much you could have announced a change in the education department; it would have improved the tone of feeling in many const.i.tuencies.

Mr. Gladstone himself had touched "the watchful jealousy" of Bright's nonconformist friends by a speech made at the time at Hawarden. This speech he explained in writing to Bright from Balmoral (Aug. 21):-

The upshot, I think, is this. My speech could not properly have been made by a man who thinks that boards and public rates ought to be used for the purpose of putting down as quickly as may be the voluntary schools. But the recommendation which I made might have been consistently and properly supported by any one whose opinions fell short of this, and did not in the least turn upon any preference for voluntary over compulsory means.(194)

As he said afterwards to Lord Granville, "I personally have no fear of the secular system; but I cannot join in measures of repression against voluntary schools."

"There is not a word said by you at Hawarden," Bright replied (Aug. 25), "that would fetter you in the least in considering the education question; but at present the general feeling is against the idea of any concession on your part.... What is wanted is some definite willingness or resolution to recover the goodwill and confidence of the nonconformist leaders in the boroughs; for without this, reconstruction is of no value.... Finance is of great moment, and people are well pleased to see you in your old office again; but no budget will heal the soreness that has been created-it is not of the pocket but of the feelings.... I want you just to know where I am and what I feel; but if I could talk to you, I could say what I have to say with more precision, and with a greater delicacy of expression. I ask you only to put the best construction on what I write."

If Forster could only have composed himself to the same considerate spirit, there might have been a different tale to tell. Bright made his election speech at Birmingham, and Forster was in trouble about it. "I think," said the orator to Mr. Gladstone, "he ought rather to be thankful for it; it will enable him to get out of difficulties if he will improve the occasion. There is no question of changing the policy of the government, but of making minor concessions.... I would willingly change the policy of irritation into one of soothing and conciliation." Nothing of great importance in the way even of temporary reconciliation was effected by Mr. Bright's return. The ditch of the twenty-fifth clause still yawned. The prime minister fell back into the position of August.

The whole situation of the ministry had become critical in every direction. "Education must be regarded as still to a limited extent an open question in the government."

When the general election came, the party was still disunited. Out of 425 liberal candidates in England, Scotland, and Wales, 300 were pledged to the repeal of the 25th clause. Mr. Gladstone's last word was in a letter to Bright (Jan. 27, 1874):-

The fact is, it seems to me, that the noncons. have not yet as a body made up their minds whether they want unsectarian religion, or whether they want simple secular teaching, so far as the application of the rate is concerned. I have never been strong against the latter of these two which seems to me impartial, and not, if fairly worked, of necessity in any degree unfriendly to religion. The former is in my opinion glaringly partial, and I shall never be a party to it. But there is a good deal of leaning to it in the liberal party. Any attempt to obtain definite pledges now will give power to the enemies of both plans of proceeding. We have no rational course as a party but one, which is to adjourn for a while the solution of the grave parts of the education problem; and this I know to be in substance your opinion.

V

(M98) The same vigorous currents of national vitality that led to new endeavours for the education of the poor, had drawn men to consider the horrid chaos, the waste, and the abuses in the provision of education for the directing cla.s.ses beyond the poor. Grave problems of more kinds than one came into view. The question, What is education? was nearly as hard to answer as the question of which we have seen so much, What is a church?

The rival claims of old cla.s.sical training and the acquisition of modern knowledge were matters of vivacious contest. What is the true place of cla.s.sical learning in the human culture of our own age? Misused charitable trusts, and endowments perverted by the fluctuations of time, by lethargy, by selfishness, from the objects of pious founders, touched wakeful jealousies in the privileged sect, and called into action that adoration of the principle of property which insists upon applying all the rules of individual ownership to what rightfully belongs to the community. Local interests were very sensitive, and they were mult.i.tudinous. The battle was severely fought, and it extended over several years, while commission upon commission explored the issues.

In a highly interesting letter (1861) to Lord Lyttelton Mr. Gladstone set out at length his views upon the issue between ancient and modern, between literary training and scientific, between utilitarian education and liberal. The reader will find this letter in an appendix, as well as one to Sir Stafford Northcote.(195) While rationally conservative upon the true basis of attainments in "that small proportion of the youth of any country who are to become in the fullest sense educated men," he is rationally liberal upon what the politics of the time made the burning question of the sacrosanct.i.ty of endowments. "It is our habit in this country," he said, "to treat private interests with an extravagant tenderness. The truth is that all laxity and extravagance in dealing with what in a large sense is certainly public property, approximates more or less to dishonesty, or at the least lowers the moral tone of the persons concerned."

The result of all this movement, of which it may perhaps be said that it was mainly inspired and guided by a few men of superior energy and social weight like Goldwin Smith, Temple, Jowett, Liddell, the active interest of the cla.s.ses immediately concerned being hardly more than middling-was one of the best measures in the history of this government of good measures (1869). It dealt with many hundreds of schools, and with an annual income of nearly six hundred thousand pounds. As the Endowed Schools bill was one of the best measures of the government, so it was Mr. Forster's best piece of legislative work. That it strengthened the government can hardly be said; the path of the reformer is not rose-strewn.(196)

VI

(M99) In one region Mr. Gladstone long lagged behind. He had done a fine stroke of national policy in releasing Oxford from some of her antique bonds in 1854;(197) but the principle of a free university was not yet admitted to his mind. In 1863 he wrote to the vice-chancellor how entirely the government concurred in the principle of restricting the governing body of the university and the colleges to the church. The following year he was willing to throw open the degree; but the right to sit in convocation he guarded by exacting a declaration of membership of the church of England.(198) In 1865 Mr. Goschen-then beginning to make a mark as one of the ablest of the new generation in parliament, combining the large views of liberal Oxford with the practical energy of the city of London, added to a strong fibre given him by nature-brought in a bill throwing open all lay degrees. Mr. Gladstone still stood out, conducting a brisk correspondence with dissenters. "The whole controversy," he wrote to one of them, "is carried on aggressively, as if to disturb and not to settle. Abstract principles urged without stint or mercy provoke the counter-a.s.sertion of abstract principles in return. There is not power to carry Mr. Goschen's speech either in the cabinet, the parliament, or the country. Yet the change in the balance of parties effected by the elections will cast upon the liberal majority a serious responsibility. I would rather see Oxford level with the ground, than its religion regulated in the manner which would please Bishop Colenso."

Year by year the struggle was renewed. Even after the Gladstone government was formed, Coleridge, the solicitor-general, was only allowed in a private capacity to introduce a bill removing the tests. When he had been two years at the head of administration, Mr. Gladstone warned Coleridge: "For me individually it would be beyond anything odious, I am almost tempted to say it would be impossible, after my long connection with Oxford, to go into a new controversy on the basis of what will be taken and alleged to be an absolute secularisation of the colleges; as well as a reversal of what was deliberately considered and sanctioned in the parliamentary legislation of 1854 and 1856. I incline to think that this work is work for others, not for me."