appears stolid and lacking in imagination. It is difficult to arouse him. Like anthracite, he catches fire slowly, but once alight he burns to the last ash. Professor John Dewey once said to the writer that the Englishman had tremendous reserves of strength stored away under an indifferent exterior, reserves which were only drawn upon for the greatest emergencies. This view is apparently a true one. The Englishman is tenacious; he never admits that a task is too big for him. If this never-admit-you-arebeaten attitude were once destroyed the whole fabric of English national life would crumble to dust. But above all, the Englishman loves individual liberty. For more than a millennium he has fought for it; Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus mean more to him than he cares to acknowledge.

The Englishman is lazy intellectually and has a deep-seated love of liberty. These traits have caused the adoption of a laissezfaire policy, not only in politics, but also in education. There has been exhibited a timidity, even a positive shrinking from the exercise of coercion in any shape or form. The English educational system, like the English Constitution, can hardly be ascribed to conscious human design or volition. Nothing in it bears the imprint of the manufactured article. The people feared the domination of the state. Consequently a national system of education developed later in England than elsewhere. Educational salvation was to be secured through individual effort and experimentation. To this day private voluntary schools flourish by the thousand, while educational efforts and experiments of the most diverse forms are to be found in every part of the country. In spite of the growing power of the Board of Education, local control is still a more potent factor in shaping the educational destinies of the nation than is the centralised administration.

This instinctive desire for liberty, this latitude, this freedom of initiative are exhibited in many ways. Educational legislation is almost invariably permissive in its opening phases. As soon as the people at large have experienced the benefits of it, and have overcome their conservative antipathy to something which is new-fangled and therefore suspect, compulsory legislation is introduced. Individual liberty gives way to the good of society as a whole. Thus compulsory attendance has followed voluntary attendance at school, compulsory medical inspection has followed voluntary medical inspection of both schools and scholars, and compulsory training has followed voluntary training of teachers. Examples such as these might be multiplied a hundred times.

There is shown also a profound respect for the individual liberty of each school and teacher. The reason why private schools are tolerated, many of them patently inefficient, is that some of them give expression to varieties of thought and principles that a state system finds it difficult or impossible to recognise. Gradually, however, many of the voluntary schools are submitting themselves to state examination and control, and in so doing are finding the condition compatible with a continued exhibition of marked individuality. The gradual disappearance of the fear of the Board of Education is shown by some of the large "public schools" inviting the Board's inspectors to report on their educational efficiency. The inspection of Harrow and Eton by the Board are cases in point. These schools will probably remain private schools forever, yet the governors of each institution were anxious to know what the central authority for education thought of their equipment and methods of teaching.

The teacher in English schools, and especially the headteacher, has far greater freedom than in any other country. The headmaster is invariably "captain on his own deck." In secondary schools the appointment and dismissal of teachers is largely in his hands; in both elementary and secondary schools, with the assistance of his staff, he frames his own curriculum and makes his own time-table. The Board of Education offers suggestions of various sorts, but if a teacher can produce a better scheme than the Board it is accepted without demur. Even experimentation in new methods of teaching and in the organisation of new departments within schools receive the official and financial encouragement of the Board. England seems to fear one thing, namely, that the teaching shall present a deadly uniformity throughout the country and be unrelieved by the faintest spark of originality.

These expressions of freedom bring some evil in their train. It is not every teacher who is fit to be trusted so completely. And control is difficult, chiefly because it is difficult to test the results of such forms of education. Efficiency of the obvious German type is impossible of attainment in the English schools. That is not the desired end. Yet efficiency of a very real, though somewhat subtle, type is undoubtedly present. It would almost seem that obvious efficiency is distrusted, even despised, by the average Englishman, and that is one reason why England has been so persistently misjudged by people of other nationalities.

Another marked feature of English educational administration is its inherent conservatism. Things are seldom done in a hurry. America would try a dozen methods of teaching or new forms of administration and probably discard them all while England was debating one of them. She is afraid of "throwing away the baby with the water from the bath." This conservatism, which tries to preserve the best of the old, has its good points, but it drives the radically-minded to distraction. It is excellently shown in the various Education Acts which Parliament passes. There is never a clean sweep; each act is invariably a compromise. English education would undoubtedly benefit by a consolidation of her Education Acts, for at present few people have a complete or even a working knowledge of them.

Yet a change is coming over England. Since 1900 the conservatism has been less in evidence than aforetime. In fact the recent changes have been many and marked. As yet few realise their profound significance. The majority simply know that something is happening in the educational world, that things are changing rapidly. They feel vaguely perturbed, but are, as yet, inarticulate. Beneath the surface, however, the conflict between the reformer and the conservative is constant, if silent. A knowledge of the forces at work is necessary for the proper appreciation of England's educational system.

II. CENTRAL CONTROL OF EDUCATION

The consolidation of all forms of English education under one central authority is not yet complete. In the first place, a very large, though unknown, number of private schools exist outside the jurisdiction of the Board of Education. Reformatory and industrial schools, together with the children who are employed in mills and factories, are still controlled by the Home Secretary. The Local Government Board inspects the premises and general arrangements of poor law schools, although the Board of Education supervises the educational work of these institutions. The Board of Agriculture has placed upon it the responsibility for the organisation of farm institutes and the agricultural work of universities and colleges, but it works in very close co-operation with the Board of Education in directing the agricultural education of the country. Army schools for soldiers and their children fall within the jurisdiction of the War Office. The Admiralty is the central authority for a complex system of navy schools

giving elementary education, not only to children of mariners and persons in Admiralty employment, but also to boys in training, in sea-going ships, and in the mechanical training establishments at Portsmouth and Devonport, and to mariners and bluejackets in service either at home or afloat. The powers of the Charity Commissioners, who formerly controlled the endowed secondary education of England, have practically all been transferred to the Board of Education. The grants to universities and university colleges are paid direct from the Treasury and not through the Board of Education, while the Customs and Excise Residue Grants are also paid direct to the various local education authorities.

The Board of Education.-With these exceptions, and on the whole they are minor exceptions, the Board of Education may be said to be the central authority for English education. This Board was created in 1899, although its origins can be traced back to two sources-the Committee of the Privy Council formed in 1839 and the Science and Art Department, officially created in 1853, but dating back to 1835. The Committee of the Privy Council was transformed into the Education Department in 1856, the Science and Art Department being placed simultaneously under the same administrative head. Dual control seldom works well, and so it proved in this case. The Bryce Commission on Secondary Education, reporting in 1895, showed that a unified, central authority was essential to any scheme of educational reform in England, and recommended the constitution of a department of the executive government, presided over by a minister responsible to Parliament, to whom elementary, secondary, and other forms of education should be entrusted. Their recommendations were carried out almost to the letter.

The Board is composed of a president, the five secretaries of state, the first commissioner of the Treasury, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but such are the perversities of English constitutional custom that it has never met and probably never will. It simply provides phantom legal colleagues for a single minister, who is responsible to Parliament and, through Parliament, to the country at large.

Parliament is as yet but mildly interested in education, although there are signs of an awakening. It has, however, definite control over education in two ways: firstly, by the control of finances which are voted upon each year (in the Budget); and, secondly, through the President of the Board, who has a

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seat in the cabinet and is responsible to the people for the proper conduct of his department.

The President of the Board, who is thus the Minister of Education, is appointed by the king. He is usually a layman and therefore needs the advice and service of experts. This is obtained through the civil service. While the general rule for filling positions in the civil service is by open competitive examination, those in the Board of Education are filled by nomination. Such a method of appointment is clearly open to abuse. Yet it has not seriously been abused. Most of the appointments can be justified on purely educational grounds, although there is a feeling that Oxford and Cambridge graduates have a monopoly of positions under the Board. Quite recently the elementary teachers of the country have forced the Board to appoint several of their number to positions in the elementary-school inspectorate. The minor positions of the Board should certainly be filled through the channel of the open examination, if only to allay fears of possible favouritism and appointment through social or family influence.

The officers of the Board holding civil service appointments are of two main kinds-examiners and inspectors. Examiners may be described as the central office staff; inspectors as the field staff, who work in the various inspectorates of the country.

Examiners attend to the routine work of the Board. They compile statistics, receive and edit inspectors' reports before forwarding them to the local authorities, and determine the amount of grant earned by each school under government control. In addition, and often with the co-operation of inspectors, they prepare the annual reports, codes, regulations, suggestions as to methods of teaching, circulars, memoranda, and blanks for statistical and other returns.

The office of inspector has long been held in high esteem, and the fact that it could claim the life services of a man as distinguished as Matthew Arnold speaks for itself. The majority of inspectors, in spite of their somewhat unusual method of appointment, are well qualified for their tasks and have enough sense to let well enough alone. Their whole aim and object is to encourage the best in education wherever found, so that experi mentation with new methods or curricula finds in them warm supporters. Through inspectors the Board aims "to organise efficient sources of educational information and to disseminate