That is a strong statement; to support it let me recall the facts of the case. First I would ask a fair-minded man to glance through some of the innumerable letters and articles which have flooded the Nonconformist and Radical press from the first introduction of the Education Bill down to the present time, and I would ask such a man to say what, taking his impressions from this source alone, he would have supposed the purport of that Bill to be. I think I may say without the slightest exaggeration that he would imagine that its effect must be (1) to hand over _all_ elementary schools to the Church of England to be disposed of at her pleasure, (2) to impose on all teachers in such schools a new and stringent religious test, whose effect would be to prevent any but Anglican (and perhaps Roman Catholic) teachers from obtaining employment. I do not think there is any exaggeration in the above plain summary. On every side one still hears phrases like “handing over the schools of the nation to the Church,” “imposing a religious test on teachers,” “giving the People’s property to the Priest,” “establishing clericalism in the public schools,” etc., which can have no other rational meaning than that stated above. Now it is not a matter of argument but one of simple fact that the Education Act did nothing of the kind,--that nothing of the kind has ever been proposed in the whole course of the controversy. What the Act did do was (1) to give effect in denominational schools (already mainly supported out of public funds) to an enormously increased measure of public control, where before clerical control had been unbridled (2) to mitigate largely the effect of such religious “tests” as can in any sense be said to have existed in such schools. No new “test” of any sort or kind was imposed, and the Provided or Board Schools remain of course entirely unaffected except as to their transference from one publicly elected and unsectarian body to another and far more efficient one. Consider for one moment the state of affairs which prevailed before the passing of the Act. There were then two kinds of public elementary school recognised by the State--the Board School and the Voluntary School. Schools of the former type were under the control of School Boards, bodies of irregular distribution and greatly varying importance. It must always be remembered that throughout more than half of England there were no School Boards at all. In the big towns you had doubtless often enough large and efficient Boards administering elementary education over the areas of great cities like London, Glasgow and Birmingham. In the country districts when they existed at all, the Boards were often elected to govern ridiculously small areas (sometimes with only one school in a whole district) and were most commonly inefficient and reactionary.