Some day, before too long, a Secondary Education Act may enable us to change all that. Meantime we must give to South Kensington the honour of stepping in when education was languishing for want of funds, and helping us to build the upper story for our board school boys and girls. This department, like the county councils which administer the Technical Instruction Acts, has no power to subsidise subjects outside its own lawful purlieus, nor can it, while we lack a recognised educational authority, award its money grants by other means than inspection and examination. Thus the intermediate school is being forced through the mill of ‘payment by results,’ from which the elementary school has at last escaped. Perhaps this was a necessary stage for both to pass through; and though some victims fell by the way and there was some injustice done, yet it served to establish the general standard of efficiency which has made the institution of more liberal methods in board schools possible. Similarly the stern South Kensington Department may help to establish a better system of science teaching through its careful inspection and insistence on practical work, and it may certainly claim to have ‘succeeded in doing what no other system could have done, carrying science instruction all over the country without ever raising any sectarian difficulty of any kind.’[18] The county councils and the Science and Art Department have become our most important educational authorities, for the very simple reason that they alone have money at their disposal. Both are limited in their operations in a manner that forces them to be unjust to some most important branches of study. Legislation can and must alter this in the immediate future. Meantime the result is to emphasise a class distinction between literary and scientific schools. In making science the distinctive mark of the lower-class school, the Department has brought about the somewhat anomalous result of degrading in the public estimation those very studies which it designed to elevate. An attempt is now being made to improve the prestige of the science school by raising the income limit to £500, in accordance with the new income-tax regulations, and including among schools acknowledged by the Department those ‘managed by a public company in the articles of association of which provision is made that no dividend shall be paid exceeding five per cent.’ Under this heading come the greater part of our best girls’ schools, and this regulation would place it in the power of the governors of these to turn a part of their school into a Science School, or to register separate classes with a view to examination and grant-earning. It would be a convenient way of adding to their income, but whether it is desirable to complicate the harmonious working of a high school by a plan of dual control and a very exacting system of outside inspection and examination seems very doubtful.