RAILWAY AND CANAL TRAFFIC ACTS, 1854-1894.

Nineteenth Annual Report of the Railway and Canal Commission, with Appendix.

HOUSING CONDITIONS (SCOTLAND). Return showing the housing conditions of the population of Scotland. BIRTHS, MARRIAGES, AND DEATHS, AND VACCINATION (SCOTLAND). Fifty-third Annual Report of the Registrar-General for Scotland, for the year 1907, and Forty-third Annual Report on Vaccination.

LOCAL TAXATION (IRELAND). Returns for the year 1906-1907. Presented (by Command), and ordered to lie on the Table.

COURT OF PROBATE DIVISION (HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE (IRELAND)). Annual account of receipts and disbursements, for the year ended 31st December, 1907.

THE LORD BISHOP OF ST. ASAPH: My Lords, in moving the Second Reading of the Bill which stands in my name I desire briefly to make clear my position and purpose in this matter. ~ I am solely responsible for this Bill. I pledge and am pledged to no one, and I compromise no one in this or in any other place. The Bill, therefore, comes before your Lordships with nothing and nobody to recommend it but its own provisions. Those provisions are largely embodied in a Bill which your Lordships read a second time without a division in 1904. That Bill was welcomed by Lord Tweedmouth, speaking then in the absence of Lord Spencer, as Leader of the Opposition. The noble Lord said

"He welcomed the Bill as a message of peace, and he hoped that later on it might be possible to expand it into a concordat."

I venture to think, my Lords, that the moment for attempting such an expansion has at last arrived. One of the main features in the Bill of 1904, was, what for brevity I will call, the parental solution of the religious problem. During the last four years a complete discovery has been made of the fact that the children in our elementary schools not only have parents, but that those parents have as much right and claim to determine the religion taught to their children as any other parent in the land.

The present moment seems opportune for another reason. Unless I am gravely mistaken, the country is weary of this prolonged controversy, and reason able and moderate men are eager for a settlement and feel that the time has come to bring about the composing of this conflict of claims. But if there is to be a settlement that settlement must

voluntary schools are in an overwhelming majority. The spectacle of the educational discord constantly before my eyes supplies my main and sustaining motive in bringing this matter before your Lordships' House.

Let me illustrate our present condition from the playground. In the early days of Rugby football I once saw a great match in which both sides were fiercely hacking each other while the football lay many yards away untouched and unheeded. And this is what is happening in Wales to-day. The real business of education is being neglected, and those who ought to be engaged in its promotion are concentrating their energies upon a persecute, to irritate, and to hamper. contemptible and squalid endeavour to You have already had in this House abundant specimens of this sordid strife. I do not think that any one who really

cares for the true interests of education can view with anything but the deepest humiliation the progress of this game which the children are treated as pawns.

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For my purpose to-day a retrospect which shall be made as brief as possible Up to 1870, the system seems necessary. of elementary education in this country was voluntary. The Church was the first to take this great work in hand. The State stepped in later when the workingman, armed with a vote, became an object of political interest. These things are quoted as reminiscences. They would be arguments if gratitude were a political asset. The Act of 1870 was avowedly supplementary in character. The Act of 1902 aimed at nothing less than the establishment of a national system of education. That Act did not claim finality, which probably belongs only to destructive legislation. But I believe that the verdict of history will be that