For the moment domestic affairs held the field. In spite of Bright's observation about driving six omnibuses abreast through Temple Bar, Forster's Education Bill was pressed forward along with the Irish Land proposals, and the Government were at once in trouble with their advanced wing, in which Sir Charles Dilke was a leader of revolt. He acted as teller along with Henry Richard when Richard took sixty dissentient Liberals into the Lobby in support of a general motion demanding that school attendance should be compulsory, and that all religious teaching should be separately paid for out of voluntary funds. When compromise was accepted: [Footnote: The Cowper Temple clause practically left religious teaching to local option. Each school was to give or not give such religious teaching as it thought well, so long as no _Board_ School was used to attach a child to a particular denomination.] 'I was, I believe, the only Liberal member who resisted the Cowper Temple amendment as accepted by the Government, and I resigned my post as Chairman of the London Branch of the Education League. I published a letter explaining the reasons for my resignation; the Committee wrote in reply that they fully agreed with me in matters of principle, and asked me to reconsider my resignation.' This, however, he refused to do, since the London Branch and the League generally were abandoning the principle in the support they gave to compromise. Throughout the Committee stage his name appears in all the numerous division lists, voting against Government as often as with it. Thus it was from a position of complete independence that he carried two amendments of great importance. 'The Bill as brought in made the School Boards mere committees of Boards of Vestries, and the amendment that School Boards should be elected by the ratepayers, which was forced on and ultimately accepted by the Government, was mine. I also was the author of the proposal that the School Board elections should be by ballot, which was carried.' [Footnote: He always regretted the substitution later of the Educational Committees of County Councils for the School Boards.] The ballot was then the question of the hour, and it was a matter upon which his study of foreign and Colonial institutions had made him an authority. In 1869 he had given evidence before the Select Committee on Parliamentary and Municipal Elections, 'explaining the working of the ballot in France, in the United States, and, above all, in Tasmania and Australia.' The evidence which he gave was of service in the preparation of the Ballot Bill of 1870, which closely followed the example set by Tasmania and South Australia. Sir John Gorst, who was already a well-known figure in English politics, though not yet in Parliament, remembered attending a debate specially to hear what this newcomer had to say upon the question of the hour.