in many places had undertaken to direct their education. This has often come out in the reports of even Church of England Inspectors. Thus the Rev. Longueville Jones, who was inspector of Church schools in Wales in 1854, says:--'The number of children in Welsh schools whose parents belong to the Church is so very small, that it requires great experience and delicacy of feeling to treat their young minds as they should be.'[168] As an illustration of the difficulty with which this gentleman had to contend, it is only necessary to refer to the statistics he gives of one school under his inspection, in which out of 107 children, only five were of parents belonging to the Church, whilst in the following year the same school contained 144 children, of whom two only were of church-going parents. To come down to a later period in the report of the Rev. S. Pryce, Inspector of Church of England Schools for Mid-Wales, for 1868, we find the following admission:--'The number of children attending the Welsh country schools I visit, is great beyond all proportion when compared with the number of persons attending church.'[169] Among the inspectors of British schools in Wales was and is Mr. J. Bowstead. We believe that Mr. Bowstead is himself a churchman. But he is a liberal and candid churchman. When, therefore, in the discharge of his office, he began to visit the country, some eighteen or twenty years ago, he was forcibly struck with the singular anomaly he found to exist, of a large number of Church schools in some cases liberally subsidized from the public funds, and in others supported by deductions from workmen's wages, planted among a population of Dissenters, who felt the strongest repugnance to much of the religious teaching forced on their children in such schools. He had the courage in his reports to expose this injustice, for which he has been ever since the _bête noire_ of the Welsh bishops and clergy, who often assail him with great acrimony and conspicuous unfairness. But on the other hand, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he has won the enthusiastic gratitude of a whole nation, who owe to him, in a main degree, the exposure of a flagrant wrong from which they had been long suffering, with little hope of deliverance. Well, Mr. Bowstead, after extensive and careful inquiry, in order to show the aggravated character of the anomaly of which he complained, ventured to say that _nine-tenths of the common people_ in Wales were Nonconformists. A writer in the April number of the _Quarterly Review_ has assailed him very angrily, and has accused him of 'asserting without a shadow of proof that _nine-tenths of the Welsh people_ are Nonconformists.' In a pamphlet issued for private circulation, Mr. Bowstead has with just severity first rebuked his assailant for perverting his words, and then shown how little foundation there is for the charge of his having asserted without 'a shadow of proof,' what