The last of the public services rendered by Dr. Chalmers to the Free Church consisted of a paper on the education question, and of his evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons on the refusal of sites. It was about the time when the question of national education was coming full into the arena of discussion; and, at the request of Mr. Fox Maule, afterwards Earl of Dalhousie, Chalmers, who had given much attention to the subject, recorded his views in a short paper. The difficulty was about the introduction of religion. Dr. Chalmers’s view was substantially that which was subsequently acted upon: he advised that there should be no legislative enactment on the subject of religion, but that the regulation of this should be left to the governing bodies of the several schools. Not that religion was unimportant, but the very reverse; but because the Christian church was so divided that it could be far better seen to by the local managers. To this he added a conscience clause; the result being substantially the system which prevails in Scotland at the present day. He took occasion to add, ’We despair of any good being done in the way of Christianising our population but through the medium of a government themselves Christian, and endowing the true religion, which I hold to be their imperative duty, not because it is the religion of the many, but because it is true.’ It was in the last month of his life that he set out for London, to meet the Site Committee. On the 9th May 1847 he preached in Marylebone Presbyterian Church, ’with more comfort than I ever did in London.’ After replying to the questions put by the committee through Mr. Maule, he encountered an onslaught from Sir James Graham, who came armed with a bundle of papers containing speeches, etc., of Chalmers, by means of which he thought to entangle him. After his long examination before Sir James appeared, Chalmers was somewhat exhausted, but he roused himself, and met him in the spirit of a practised warrior. The only point of importance raised by Sir James arose out of the London lectures, in which he had spoken very favourably of the Church of England. ’I told him that I did not advocate the Church of England; that I felt more hopeful of it then than now, when like to be overrun by Puseyism; that even then I denounced its figment of an Apostolical succession, and, without directly attacking its Erastianism, spoke of our own independence, and in terms which provoked the jealousy of English churchmen,’ etc. etc. But a great part of the examination concerned the voting of women at the election of office-bearers and the like; a paltry question, as Dr. Chalmers called it, having no sort of reasonable connection with the refusal of sites. ’We concluded,’ Dr. Chalmers wrote to his wife, ’in a state of great exhaustion, yet with an erect demeanour and visage unabashed.’