the Leeds Congress, recommending the Council to continue their labours to aid in securing from Parliament a comprehensive measure dealing with the sale of intoxicating liquors. A series of resolutions were drawn up and approved by the Council, and ordered to be presented to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, who had charge of the Licensing Bill. Many of these suggestions also have been adopted by the Legislature.

The Committee of Labour and Capital have had under their notice the builders' lock-out and strike in London, and have been able to render useful service. Resolutions by the Committee, advising a friendly conference between the masters and workmen, and, if necessary, reference to arbitration, having been issued, the masters at once expressed their willingness to adopt them; and in a short time the masons also, in effect, gave their consent; the speedy result being an abandonment of the strike so far as the masons were concerned, and the complete cessation of the lock-out.

The prize of ten guineas offered by a Member of the Association for the best " Essay on Domestic Service; its Use and Abuse," has been awarded to the Rev. J. C. Harrington, of Hurstmonceux Place, Sussex.

The Council have to record with regret the death of Sir John Bowring, LL.D., who held the office of President of the Economy and Trade Department for the present year, and delivered his address as such at the Congress at Devonport.

The Council have further to record the death of several Members of the Association; among them, Dr. Aldis (London), C. H. Bracebridge, Esq. (Atherston), J. S. Bickford, Esq. (Cornwall), Potto Brown, Esq. (Huntingdon), Robert Cox, Esq. (Edinburgh), Henry Charlton, Esq. (Bristol), G. M. Haddock, Esq. (London), M. D. Hill, Esq., Q.C. (Bristol), Lawrence Heyworth, Esq. (Liverpool), George Laing, Esq. (Edinburgh), Sir Henry Lambert, Bart. (Malvern), and Rev.

Professor Maurice (Cambridge). Of the assistance rendered to the Association by the late M. D. Hill, Esq., Q.C., and Dr. Aldis, the Council have passed resolutions signifying their high appreciation.

The next Annual Meeting will be held in Norwich.

EDWIN PEARS.

January, 1873.

Opening Address

BY

THE RIGHT HON. LORD NAPIER AND ETTRICK, K.T.

PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION.

THE year which has gone by since the last meeting of this Association may not be pre-eminently conspicuous in the annals of Social Science, but it will not pass undistinguished or unremembered. It has given birth to two enactments at least, which are destined to have an honourable place upon our educational and sanitary roll-the Scotch Education Act, and the Public Health Act. It has also witnessed the gradual development of the Act for Elementary Instruction in England, a process on which the attention of the country is fixed with more than usual anxiety and emotion.

The Education Act for Scotland passes comparatively unobserved, for two reasons: it does not affect a great number, and it does not supply a great necessity. The people of Scotland form but a small proportion of the Imperial aggregate, and the provisions for instruction, though defective in amount, in character, and in application, if tested by a high theoretic standard, had sufficed to constitute a nation possessing a vigorous intellectual cast, a large share of useful knowledge, and a strong appreciation of the value of learning. The ancient institutions for popular education, so long regarded by the Scotch with pride and fondness, have been brought under a comprehensive law adapted to the diversified interests and liberal principles of the age; but the census for 1871 records to the honour of the past that it has bequeathed to the present a people of whom fifteen per cent. are in the receipt of primary instruction, and a body of children between the ages of five and thirteen of which four-fifths are attending school. This result represents the spontaneous growth of national inclination, and it contrasts, as far as numbers are concerned, not unfavourably with the effects of long-sustained official compulsion on the Continent of Europe.

The Scotch Education Act comprises three capital features: a

general system of local management, a general rate, and universal obligatory attendance. It is complete and absolute where the Act for England is partial and facultative. These provisions are, however, raised upon an old basis, and could not have been established without it; the School Board is a transformation of the heritors' meeting; the rate is an expansion of the former charge upon the land; and the rule of compulsion has been adopted in deference to the demand of public opinion, trained by religion and prudence to recognise the obligation of the parent to provide for the education of his child. What was good before and what is better now the modern Scotch owe to the forecast of their Calvinistic and sagacious ancestors. The merits which have been ascribed to my countrymen, in a recent speech by a statesman, whose praise is sparingly bestowed, must be proved by the manner in which new prerogatives and new resources are employed. I am not, however, disposed to question the capacity of elective school boards under the advice and restraint of a central authority to regulate the distribution and determine the course of elementary instruction. The poor will support the privations which may be attached to the prolonged restriction of the labour power of the family; the imposition of a rate which strikes a humble class of occupiers may not excite any lasting discontents or resentments; and the proprietors of land may find, in the transfer of a portion of their burden to new shoulders, the motion and the means for continuing in other forms the spontaneous co-operation in educational work which the present law is not designed to arrest or exclude. It cannot be expected that all in the outset will be serenity and concord; but on deliberation the people of Scotland will probably recognise in the new measure a well-considered instrument for giving stimulus and expansion to elementary and middle-class instruction. If I had to indicate a defect in the Act, I would say that it is not flexible enough to meet exceptional wants; that it does not provide facilities which correspond entirely to the obligations which it imposes. A law which prescribes attendance on the part of all should supply teaching accessible to all; but I fail to discover any machinery by which the scattered inhabitants of an inclement and neglected region could be appropriately reached. There are districts in Scotland where the schoolmaster should be a missionary; where the teacher should rather be deputed to the learners, than the learners convoked to the teacher. I should like to see some organized agency of pupil-teachers acting under the authority of school boards, empowered to undertake tours of instruction in the winter months, giving lessons alternately at several

stations, to which small groups of children could be gathered. The amount of physical exertion now incumbent on children of very tender age in the wilder districts must act unfavourably on the regularity of attendance and the faculty of learning. It may even have a deteriorating influence on physical health. But whatever may be the partial shortcomings of the Scotch Act, it certainly stands alone in this country as an embodiment of educational provisions for the lower and middle orders. Nothing of this nature has been adopted before in the United Kingdom, and probably nothing better is in force in the British colonies. Nor will the exercise of the Scotch Act be without some influence on the contemporaneous working of the English law; for Scotland, starting from a more advanced position, may offer examples to England in elementary education, as England does to the smaller and poorer country in the cultivation of the higher and more refined branches of learning.

The Report of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education, issued in the month of July last, possesses peculiar interest, as it contains some important statements respecting the progress made in the application of the provisions of the Act for elementary education, and some valuable indications in the reports by Her Majesty's inspectors of the disposition with which the provisions of the Act and of the new code are being received in various parts of the country by denominational agencies. Regarding the physiognomy and working of the elementary schools constituted under the authority of the school boards, there is as yet little or nothing.

The leading facts are no doubt familiar to those whom I have the honour to address, but they are worthy of recapitulation on an occasion of this nature, for they contain so much that may give legitimate satisfaction to this Association and to the whole country.

School boards had been formed in school districts containing 9,741,667 persons, including the metropolis.

Bye-laws prescribing compulsory attendance had been adopted in school districts containing 8,140,657.

A population of 12,992,444 souls still inhabited school districts without school boards, the educational condition of which had, however, been thoroughly investigated by the Educational Department.

The department was actively engaged in preparing and issuing the notices contemplated by the Act, under which proved educational deficiencies must be made good by the compulsory election of school boards in the absence of commensurate spontaneous efforts for the same purpose.