But no sooner was the first draft of the Bill before the country than the campaign of unscrupulous mis-statement began. The loudest and most popular cry was that the Bill “imposed” a religious test on teachers. I remember once at a public debate asking a gentleman who urged this with great rhetorical effect to point out to me the Clause of the Bill which imposed such a test. There upon I experienced the keen pleasure of watching my antagonists struggle through a copy of the Bill in the hopeless endeavour to find such a clause. Of course he did not find it for the same reason which prevented Tilburina from seeing the Spanish Fleet. There is no religious test imposed by the Act. Its sole effect in this respect is firstly to introduce an elective and nonsectarian element into the body which appoints the teacher and secondly to allow that body to over-ride any religious test imposed upon assistant teachers by the Trust-deeds of the school. Then came the cry that the “People’s Schools” were being “handed over to the Priest.” What this meant I cannot conceive. The reference could hardly be to the denominational schools which before the passing of the Act were absolutely under the control of the “Priest” while under the Act his control is to say the least of a very shadowy and much mitigated character. I am therefore forced to the conclusion that those who used the phrase really supposed--or at any rate wished others to suppose--that the Board Schools were handed over to the Church, which is of course so monstrously untrue, so devoid of even the faintest shadow of foundation in fact, that it is difficult to put it on paper without laughing. There is, so far as I can see, no escape from one of these conclusions. Either the Nonconformists who made use of these catch-words and of many others like them had never read the Education Acts, or they were incapable of understanding the plainest English, or, having read the Acts and knowing their purport they deliberately misrepresented them. Take which ever explanation you choose:--are they men whom we can safely trust with political power?