ecclesiastical law. An act of 1714 exempted elementary schools from the penalties of the conformity legislation, and so such schools could, if they would, multiply. The opportunity for a great movement was at hand: the question for England, perhaps the question for civilization, was, would it be seized? To attempt to deal in any detail with the manner in which this opportunity, emerging so obscurely among the bitter political conflicts of the time, was seized, is beyond the scope of a review article,[1] but I may indicate some broad aspects of the movement.
First, we must remember that the modern system, though it includes now all the endowed educational foundations that had fallen on to evil days at the end of the seventeenth century, did not in any sense spring from those old foundations. It was not till the middle of the nineteenth century that the abuses in these foundations were remedied. "Whoever will examine," said Lord Kenyon in 1795, "the state of the grammar schools in different parts of this kingdom will see to what a lamentable condition most of them are reduced. * * * empty walls without scholars, and everything neglected but the receipt of the salaries and emoluments." The state of the Court of Chancery was such that it would have ruined any individual as well as the endowment to have brought almost any specific case before the courts. These foundations lay dormant till better days—till the days of the grammar school act of 1840 and the endowed schools act of 1869. It may be stated generally that it was not until after 1870 that the ancient grammar schools and endowed schools—the numerous secondary schools of the country which are now proving of such vast importance in coordination with the state-aided primary system became in any sense efficient. Yet we have to look to a certain class of endowed schools for one source of the modern elementary system. In England and Wales there were in 1842 some 3,000 endowed schools and of these more than 1,000 were founded between the years 1660 and 1730. This extraordinary movement, which has left so vast a result, is certainly difficult to understand. About the year 1660 church and state had practically suppressed endowed education, and yet in the face of that suppression a huge endowment movement arose. One explanation is certainly Bates's case, which decided in 1670 that a schoolmaster presented by the founder of a school or by a lay patron could not be ejected from his office by reason of his not holding the bishop's license. This case was a direct incentive to all dissenters, and to all who hated the Erastianity of the period, to found schools where children could be safely educated. This appears to be a reasonable explanation of a movement which was as remarkable as it has been unnoticed by historians,-This explanation finds support in the
- ↑ I have dealt with it at some length in my volume on 'State Intervention in English Education,' published last year by the Cambridge University Press.
