DISCONTENT IN THE TOWN.--Meanwhile serious discontent had arisen with the constitution of the body of governors. By the original charter it was laid down that they should be “twenty of the more discreet inhabitants.” But, by the operation of the method of co-optation in filling up vacancies, the following state of things, as given by Mr. T. H. Green, one of the assistant commissioners of 1864, had arisen. “The Board has fairly represented the upper or more select section of society in Birmingham, so far as this section is politically conservative and attached to the established Church. It has been necessarily antagonistic to the Town Council, and careless or contemptuous of local politics. To belong to it has been a certain social distinction. Social and municipal distinction have not coincided, and hence the Board has been an object of public animosity, irrespectively of the manner in which it has exercised its functions.”[11] And this it still more strongly put in the report of the Commission. “No dissenter, within the memory of man, has been a governor; till recently no one of liberal politics has been a governor; no mayor of the town has till the present year been a governor; no member of the borough except one, a conservative; not one Town Councillor.” Abortive attempts were made in 1831, 1842, and 1861, to introduce the Town Council element; and in 1864, after much newspaper agitation, signalised especially by the letters of “Historicus,”[12] a grammar school Reform Association was formed, which, in 1865, in conjunction with the Town Council, endeavoured in vain to induce the Governors to surrender the principle of co-optation. Both appealed to the Endowed Schools Commissioners, who proposed that there should be 21 governors, of whom 10 should be chosen by the Town Council, and the rest by co-optation; and that for the future free education should be given only to those who had passed a competitive examination. In 1868, however, the Town Council resolved to demand that all the governors should be elected from their body, a demand they repeated in 1872 (in answer to a slight modification by the Commissioners of the above scheme). They also objected to the proposed entrance and tuition fees.