These schools were always known as British Schools; and in theory they were carried on in connexion with the British and Foreign School Society, one guiding principle of which was that the children should have plain, undenominational Bible teaching. Up to 1871 the inspection of Elementary schools was carried on by three sorts of H.M. Inspectors. The Church schools were inspected by clergymen; the Roman Catholic schools by Roman Catholic laymen; and the other schools by laymen, of whom the best known was Matthew Arnold. In Wales the British Schools in receipt of Government grant were not numerous; and North Wales was grouped with Lancashire and Cheshire. As a rule their inspector lived in London, and, except when he paid his annual visit, they saw nothing of him. Nor indeed had he, I believe, before May, 1871, the right to enter the doors without due notice. And as the managers were for the most part unlearned men, whose interest lay chiefly in the balance sheet, the schoolmaster farmed the whole concern--that is, he took the children’s school pence, the annual grant, and the subscriptions, and paid the expenses, retaining the remainder for his salary--or, alternatively, he had a salary varying with the grant. In either case his income depended on the regular attendance of the children: for the grant was paid in part on the unit of average attendance, and in part on the success in examination of each child who had attended 250 times. All these statistics were recorded in registers, and it is easy to see that there were many temptations to fraud and few checks. In one case the master of a large British school confessed to me that he had had no registers for three months: he had recorded the attendance in copybooks and he was “going to transcribe them.” The religious instruction which these worthies were supposed to give--and I believe that up to 1871 it was a condition precedent of the Code grant in all schools, as it certainly was an essential feature of British schools--often seemed to have been dropped. In one case I asked casually and unofficially what the arrangements were, and the master told me he read a chapter of the Bible every morning. “In English or in Welsh?” “Oh, in English,” he replied eagerly; for Welsh was discouraged by My Lords. “And do the children understand it?” “Well, no, indeed; but it is just while they are coming in, and it doesn’t matter.” I made no remark. We were forbidden to make any enquiry.