The School Question in England
By Editor
DURING the recent discussion of the principles involved in the movement to secure the introduction of religious instruction into the public schools of the District of Columbia reference has frequently been made to the present situation in England, and to the troubles which have attended the administration of the Education acts of 1902 and 1903. The reply has uniformly been that the two cases were not parallel, and that the non-conformists of England did not complain of religious instruction in the schools, and that they did not oppose the present Education act because they regarded it as bringing about a union of church and state; but that the whole difficulty grew out of the fact that the control of religious instruction was placed in the hands of the established church. A recent number of the Literary Digest contained an article which reviewed the situation in England, and gave liberal extracts from a contribution on this subject to The North American Review from the pen of Dr. John Clifford, the London Baptist leader. Dr. Clifford sets forth the facts, and gives an interpretation of them, which shows clearly what the real issue is, and for what principle the passive resisters are standing. He says:— At the beginning of the twentieth century Englishmen of high character and indisputable loyalty are being sent to prison for exactly the same reasons as those which were urged for committing John Bunyan to jail; for exposing Richard Baxter to the brow-beating of Judge Jeffreys and a sentence of eighteen months' incarceration; and for sending George Fox to the noisome dungeons of Carlisle and Derby, Lancaster and London. According to the statement made by Dr. Clifford it appears that during the last year and a half nearly a hundred English freemen have been sentenced to different periods of imprisonment. One feeble old man, who had been a minister of the gospel for nearly forty years, refused to pay the tax for the maintenance of sectarian schools, and was imprisoned, “weighed and stripped, put on prison fare, and sent to a plank bed.” One preacher has been sent to jail twice. Since June, 1903, there have been about sixteen hundred cases of the public sale of the furniture, pictures, and books of those who refused to submit, and no less than forty thousand summonses have been sent forth by overseers to compel recalcitrant rate-payers to appear before the magistrates and “show cause” why they will not pay. In giving the reasons for the present wide-spread dissatisfaction with the educational system and the refusal to pay the taxes levied for its support, Dr. Clifford states that by the act of 1870 the “national system of education was made absolutely secular,” and the principle was established that “the citizens, as4citizens, were not to pay for sectarian teaching.” The change made by the Education acts of 1902 and 1903 are thus described by Dr. Clifford:— Those acts destroyed the school board system of 1870, and opened the doors for the control of the clerics in what had been thoroughly democratic institutions; they continue and aggravate the wrongs inflicted on the teaching profession (and on the nation) by subjecting its members to ecclesiastical tests, and inflicting an injustice on citizens by making entrance into a department of the civil service impossible except by the avowal of particular theological opinions; thus sixteen thousand head-masterships are closed against all but Anglicans. They place the sectarian schools of Anglicans and Catholics directly on the rates [that is to say, these schools are supported by general taxation]. Every citizen is forced to contribute to their up-keep. The payment of teachers, of “nuns” and “Christian Brothers,” and Anglican teachers, is derived from the rates and taxes, just as the payment of the police or of the officials of the borough councils. Furniture, books, machinery, prayer-books, crucifixes, images, light, heat, are all paid from the rates. Some of the books our money provides charge free churchmen with being “schismatics,” “heretics,” and the teachers are trained to represent to the children of free churchmen that the churches of their fathers are not “churches of Christ at all;” and that their existence is opposed to the teaching of the Scripture and to the good of the country. In summing up the situation, Dr. Clifford says:— We seek the total separation of churches, as churches, and clerics, as clerics, from all state education, elementary, secondary, and university. The functions of the church and state must be kept apart, in control, in cost, and in every way. Let the churches do their own work at their own cost, and as they will; and the citizens do theirs in their way and at their cost, and without the interference of the churches. That is the one and only way to educational efficiency, social harmony, and national progress. Although the local circumstances are somewhat different, it is perfectly evident that the general issue is the same in England as has been before us in Washington—the question of the union of church and state. The non-conformists of England object to being compelled to pay for the propagation of religious views which they do not hold, and which represent them as “heretics,” and their religion as opposed to “the good of the country.” They declare that “the functions of the church and state must be kept apart,” and recommend that “the churches do their own work at their own cost.” This is exactly the ground which has been taken by those who have protested against the introduction of religious instruction into the public schools of the District of Columbia, and the sectarian animosities and the religious persecution now in evidence in England are plainly suggestive of what we may expect in this country, if, at the demand of the church, the attempt is made to introduce religious teaching into the public schools. We agree with Dr. Clifford that the total separation of church and state in the management of the schools “is the one and only way to educational efficiency, social harmony, and national progress.”