for voting came.  The Liberal Government, in spite of its immense victory at the polls, scored a fourfold failure in its attempts to redress that grievance, and it remains unredressed to this hour.  Not that I admired the Liberal Education Bills.  My own doctrine on the matter was expressed by my friend Arthur Stanton, who said in 1906:  “I think National and Compulsory Education must be secular, and with facilities for the denominations to add their particular tenets.  My objection to this Bill” (Mr. Birrell’s Bill) “is that it subsidizes undenominationalism.”  And again in 1909, when another of our Liberal practitioners was handling the subject:  “I object altogether to the State teaching religion.  I would have it teach secular matters only, and leave the religious teaching entirely to the clergy, who should undertake it at their own expense.  This is the only fair plan—­fair to all.  The State gives, and pays for, religious teaching which I do not regard as being worth anything at all.  It is worse than useless.  Real religious teaching can only be given by the Church, and when Christ told us to go and teach, He did not mean mathematics and geography.”

That was, and is, my doctrine on religious education; but in politics we must take things as they are, and must not postpone practicable reforms because we cannot as yet attain an ideal system.  So Mr. Fisher, wisely as I think, has left the religious question on one side, and has proposed a series of reforms which will fit equally well the one-sided system which still oppresses Nonconformists and the simply equitable plan to which I, as a lover of religious freedom, aspire.

I see that some of Mr. Fisher’s critics say:  “This is not a great Bill.”  Perhaps not, but it is a good Bill; and, as Lord Morley observes, “that fatal French saying about small reforms being the worst enemies of great reforms is, in the sense in which it is commonly used, a formula of social ruin.”  Enlarging on this theme, Lord Morley points out that the essential virtue of a small reform—­the quality which makes it not an evil, but a good—­is that it should be made “on the lines and in the direction” of the greater reform which is desiderated.

Now, this condition Mr. Fisher’s Bill exactly fulfils.  I suppose that the “greater reform” of education which we all wish to see—­the ideal of national instruction—­is that the State should provide for every boy and girl the opportunity of cultivating his or her natural gifts to the highest perfection which they are capable of attaining.  When I speak of “natural gifts” I refer not only to the intellect, but also to the other parts of our nature, the body and the moral sense.  This ideal involves a system which, by a natural and orderly development, should conduct the capable child from the Elementary School, through all the intermediate stages, to the highest honours of the Universities.

The word “capable” occurs in Mr. Fisher’s Bill, and rightly, because our mental and physical capacities are infinitely varied.  A good many children may be unable to profit by any instruction higher than that provided by the Elementary School.  A good many more will be able to profit by intermediate education.  Comparatively few—­the best—­will make their way to really high attainment, and will become, at and through the Universities, great philosophers, or scholars, or scientists, or historians, or mathematicians.