their subsequent training will be necessary. It is to be hoped that the Education Department and Parliament will take this matter in hand, and that, as in Scotland, the universities will be associated with the education of our teachers. The School Board has power to organise classes for ex-pupil teachers in its service who do not go to college, and it is to be hoped that this will be done by the new Board, though the ordeal of teaching in school by day and studying at night is one which only strong persons of sound constitution should undergo.

In passing from the teachers to the subjects taught, it must be remembered that the range and scope for varying the instruction given is not very wide; the curriculum is practically determined by the code. Reading, writing, arithmetic, singing by note, English grammar, and geography, form the staple of instruction in the boys' schools, and in the girls' schools the same subjects, with the substitution of needlework for geography. In addition, the London School Board has always required the teaching of drawing, and, no doubt, since the report of the, Commission on Technical Education, and the recognition of our national deficiencies in the necessary preliminary education which should make men good workmen, and since the recognition of drawing as a class subject by the Education Department, more prominence will be given to this branch of teaching. The elder girls in the upper standards are all taught cookery, and this is found very attractive to the girls, and will do much to increase the happiness and comfort of the homes of the working class. The blind and the deaf and dumb have special and suitable instruction furnished to them, and this branch of the work of the Board might be, and will be, somewhat extended, but it will never be a very important portion of that work, though most valuable to the unfortunate class for whose benefit it exists.

Having regard to the cry of over-pressure, which has now quieted down, while there was very little foundation for it, yet it will have been not without its use if it has reminded school managers and School Boards that children have bodies as well as minds, and that their health should be studied as well as their intellectual progress. Something has already been said about the importance of suitable gymnastic apparatus and training. Physical exercises have for some time. been taught to the girls, and classes held for the teachers, and the Swedish system, by far the most complete and the most scientifically studied, is being introduced into the schools. This is a matter which should be extended and made use of more widely if the schools are to produce their full effect in

improving the condition of the children. A very important part of the work of the London School Board is the proper organization of the infant schools. There is no country where infant schools have been so flourishing as to numbers as in England, but unfortunately intelligent methods have not kept pace with the numerical extension. The recognition of childish nature, the calling out of childish activity, the moralizing of the young life, these should be among the principal aims and ideas which should permeate the infant teacher rather than a premature and barren production of literary results. Infant schools, even if nothing were taught, would be a boon to the poor who have to leave their children while they go out to work, and a boon to the children who are saved from the risks and exposures of the streets. But an infant school which is not merely a shelter and a refuge, but a home and a garden for the cultivation and blossoming of the young soul, and a place of happy transition from the cradle to the school, is a blessing, which, though not realised as fully as it should be, can be, and in many cases is, found for the encouragement of teachers and the welfare of the nation. Let it not, however, be supposed that the qualities required for an infant school teacher are more easily found or can be purchased more cheaply than the attainments needed for teaching elder children. Here, as elsewhere, a good thing must be paid for, and will cost money. And now, having run over some of the more prominent points in the work of the School Board, let us pause for a moment on its cost.

No doubt the cost is heavy, far heavier than was expected in the infancy of the work, far heavier than the cost outside of London. The main reason of this increased cost is to be found in the salaries of teachers. Even with the salaries now offered the School Board has a difficulty in getting really good teachers, especially among the women, whose shorter average of teaching life necessitates a more rapid reinforcement of their ranks. If a new Board were to determine ruthlessly to cut down salaries, it might possibly, at the cost of dislocating its work and crippling its education, save £100,000, or one penny of the rate. But such a method of economy would be disastrous. The School Board would be getting the worst instead of the best teachers, the education of the children would suffer, the teachers who remained would have a sense of grievance and of injustice which would greatly impair the heartiness and efficiency of their work. It is idle to suppose that the future will be satisfied with the low standard and cheapness of education which has been characteristic of the exigencies of the

voluntary system. After all, though in England all salaries range higher than on the Continent, and therefore the cost of our schools is high, yet the English standard of schools and of education is still very low compared with what may be found in Paris, in Berlin, and not only in the great towns of Europe, but in the villages of Switzerland and of Norway; whereas our colonies and the United States are far in advance of us in the money they willingly spend on education. Let the agitator seek for fresh sources of income rescued from sectarian purposes and applied to the nation, and he will truly relieve the burden on the ratepayer; but do not let him think that he can seriously reduce the cost of that most precious thing, education, which is doing so much, with other regenerating and progressive influences, to change the whole aspect of English society.

If there were time it might be shown that much of the apparent cost of London School Board education, as compared with the voluntary schools, is delusive. The payment of rates by board schools to the amount of about two shillings and sixpence or three shillings a-head on each child, while the voluntary schools are rated at nominal sums, is one item in the delusive comparison. Voluntary schools transferred to the Board have been at once estimated at sums of £500 or £700 a year instead of about £50 a year. Again, in the cost of voluntary schools the value of the house occupied by the head teacher does not appear, nor the price paid to him by the children for their books, and the profit he is sometimes allowed to make by their sale as part of his income. But we need not dwell on these points, for after all the main question is, Do we wish the schools to be thoroughly good? Are we prepared to pay fair salaries to teachers sufficient to encourage persons of education to be teachers? Do we wish there to be schools enough for all the children? If we wish for these things we must recognize that, with all care and economy in administration, they must cost a substantial sum, far more than the charity school of the past, with its narrow aims and its inability to realize even its own ideal. Whatever the result of the coming elections may be, the people of London will ultimately determine in favour of what is good though costly. If the pressure of taxation is heavy, they must relieve it by the application of funds ecclesiastical and educational, now misused or unduly restricted, to be handed over to the administration of the representatives of the people for the use and advancement of the whole nation.

E. LYULPH STANLEY.

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THE Revised Old Testament has been received by the press and public with an approval as distinct and general as was the chorus of condemnation which greeted the appearance of the New. The difference of verdict is doubtless due in part to secondary causes. But when these have been discounted it remains evident that to the wisdom of the Revisers belongs the main credit for the popularity of their work. They have steered clear of the rock on which their comrades made shipwreck, for they have produced what was expected of them, and not something else. The public looked to find in the Revised New Testament an old friend with a new face. Instead of this they were conscious of a strange presence, and their eye detected an unfamiliar gait. The words were indeed English, but the structure and movement of the thought were Greek. Like Isaac they exclaimed, 'The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.' And more cautious or less pliable than the patriarch, they have withheld their blessing from the new aspirant to biblical favour. Wiser in their generation, the Old Testament Company have resisted the solicitations of a sharp but narrow-sighted scholarship, and have not attempted violently to naturalize Hebrew idiom in Saxon speech. They have been content to produce English thought in English phrase, and in the cordial welcome their work has won, verily they have their reward.

If the task of the New Testament Revisers was predominantly theological, that of the Old Testament Company was in a pre-eminent degree literary. In the rich poetry of the Psalter, the condensed wit of the Proverbs, and the variegated oratory of the Prophets, there is a far wider range of artistic effect than can find foothold in the simple narrative of the Gospels or the unadorned dialectic of St. Paul. Of the proof texts, whose tenour has been trodden hard in the memory by constant dogmatic use, nine occur in the New Testament for one that is found in the Old. But it is in the Hebrew Scriptures that are enshrined those sublime compositions of inspired imagination and impassioned utterance, that even in their English dress assert for themselves the artistic inviolability of great works of genius. To lay even the gentlest hand of renovation on these cherished heirlooms was an undertaking demanding for its success the firmest touch and the finest taste. To rudely ruffle their fondly-loved features even by deserved correction, to attempt to replace

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them by substitutes more accurate but less artistic, to do anything to alter their distinctive character and familiar, if antique, flavour, would have been even more disastrous in the case of the Old Testament than it was in the case of the New. tunately, from the outset the Company seem to have recognized the limits and grasped the essence of their task, and to this conception they have kept with praiseworthy consistency. Their duty was not to produce a new version that should reflect the critical, exact, and somewhat prosaic spirit of the nineteenth century. A less heroic but more arduous enterprise was theirs—to amend and restore an old honoured classic of the English tongue by the correction of errors, the excision of archaisms, and the improvement of its general texture in respect of fidelity, harmony, and lucidity. In a word, their business was not translation, but revision.

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The industry of the Company has been extraordinary, and their method, save in a single particular, excellent. They subjected their work to three several revisions, and in each case had before them the written opinions of absent members. Soon after the commencement of the enterprise a consulting Committee was formed in America, and with the exception of the Pentateuch the Westminster Company had the benefit of their criticisms and suggestions at the second and third revisions. The one flaw, as we cannot but count it, in their procedure was the condition imposed upon them by Convocation, that no change should be finally made in the text of the Authorized Version except by the vote of two-thirds of the Company present and voting.' While, therefore, in the first revision emendations were adopted by the voice of a majority only, in the second and in the third every alteration was rejected which, though approved by the greater number, failed to secure the suffrages of a two-thirds majority. The result is that the revised text is not the text of the majority but of a minority, and that much of the scholarship and good sense of the Company has been relegated to the obscure seclusion of the margin. Animated partly by the instincts of conservatism and partly by the conviction that a profusion of change would be fatal to their undertaking, the minority have in the final revisions effected a wholesale retrenchment in the amount of alteration admitted to the text. Whole platoons of improved readings have been made to execute a strategic movement to the rear, and have, with that discretion which is not always the better part of valour, retired into the margin. To a large extent this evolution was dictated by statesmanship if not by scholarship. Yet we cannot but think that, had the