THE AGRICULTURAL CHILDREN'S ACT.
ON the day on which the Times reported Lord Hartington's prophecy that the honour of settling the Education question may, after all, be reserved for the Liberal party, it also printed a letter which shows how large a part of that question still remains to be settled. A "West-Country Parson" describes a conversation he held last week with a boy whom he met while engaged in visiting his parish. This boy is eleven years of age, and is in the employ of a respectable farmer. As no abridge- ment could do justice to the boy's answers to the parson's questions, we give the conversation in full :—" Have you ever been to school ? No.—Can you read or write ? No.—Have you ever been to a place of worship ? No.—Do you ever say any prayers ? No.—Do you know who Jesus Christ was ? No.— Have you ever heard of God ? No.—Do you know what will become of you after death ? No.—Have you a father and mother ? Yes.—Do they ever go to a place of worship ? No. —What do you do on Sundays ? Look after the cattle and such like." This is not an incident that a clergyman can be expected to regard with patience. Before the passing of the Agricultural Child- ren's Act, he could only have lamented the hardness of heart of the parent who sends the boy to work instead of to school, or of the farmer who employs the boy without asking whether he ought not to be at school. But Parliament has now put arms into the parson's hands. There is a law, and by that law every boy under twelve years ought to be at school. Where there is no School Board there can still be no direct compulsion, because the parent is not touched by the Agricul- tural Children's Act. But wherever there is agricultural labour, there can be indirect compulsion, because the Act was specially framed to reach employers of children. The "West- Country Parson" then goes on to describe how far it can be said to reach the employer of this boy. The farmer, he says, Is"knowingly breaking the law day after day, and who is to stop him ? He snaps his fingers at the Act of Parliament, for he knows perfectly well that there is nobody in the parish who dares inform against him. His landlord will not trouble him ; and as for the parson, he had better not meddle, and I do not think the parson had better meddle, for should I do so, I should at once make a bitter enemy of every farther in the parish, in- cluding the squire, and thus any influence for good I may at
present have with them would at once be nullified and turned into violent opposition." We shall have a word to say about this reading of pastoral duty further on. At present we are only deal- ing with the parson's account of the situation. Here is an unmis- takable violation of an Act of Parliament which was passed by a Conservative majority, in order to act as a buffer against the dreaded advance of direct compulsion and its supposed accom- paniment,—universal School Boards. This breach of the law is known to the two persons who might presumably have in- fluence with the offender, in the way either of persuasion or of threats. One of these two persons, the squire, will not move in the matter - the other, the parson, thinks it best not to move in it. :Ind the result is, as the "West-Country Parson" truly says, that this boy, and others like him, are allowed to grow up in a state of brutish ignorance, "because, having an Act of Parliament framed expressly for remedying evils of this kind, there is no machinery whatever for putting it in force."
There are those who think that the authors of the Agricul- tural Children's Act never intended it to be anything more than the useless scarecrow which it evidently is in at least one parish in the West of England. We do not believe that this is in the least a just accusation. It is not borne out by facts, and it is still less borne out by probabilities. In the matter of education, the Conservative party naturally and necessarily take their tone from the Clergy, and the clergy have abundantly proved that they are ready to build schools, and anxious to get their schools filled. A man who himself contributes largely to the parish school, and is constantly engaged in per- suading his friends to contribute, is not likely to be indifferent to the state of the school-benches. He will have a sense of success or failure, according as his work is appreciated by those for whose use it was designed, and besides this, he will know that every absent child is so many pence deducted from the school-fees and from the Government grant. So much for the facts. As regards the probabilities, they all point in the same direction. The clergy are well
aware that the Education Act has provided an alternative machinery for cases in which voluntary effort has failed to provide school accommodation or efficient schooling for the children of the poor, and they are equally well aware that there is a zealous and influential minority in the country hard at work collecting evidence to show that even when volun- tary effort does provide school accommodation and efficient schooling, it altogether fails to get the children to school. They are not at all disposed to under-rate the strength of this minority, or to doubt that, provided it can make this position good, it will in the end induce Parliament to pass a stronger Education Act. These considerations all point to the con- clusion that the authors of the Agricultural Children's Act really wished it to be an effective measure. Why, then, did they provide no machinery for putting it in force? They must have known that laws do not execute themselves, and yet, notwithstanding this knowledge, they left the Agri- cultural Children's Act to do unassisted what it is in the power of no law to do unassisted. How is this to be reconciled with the theory that they really wished to reach agricultural child- ren, and to ensure them a certain minimum of schooling? The answer is that the Conservative party, though it has elemen- tary education to think of, has also local taxation to think of. The natural method of enforcing the Agricultural Children's Act would have been to appoint Inspectors to see that it is obeyed. But Inspectors need to be paid, and a rate levied to pay the salary of an inspector would be as repugnant to the farmers as a rate levied to pay the expenses of a School Board. They would have treated the imposition as a direct breach of the contract, that so long as the farmers continued hostile to School Boards no rates should be levied for purposes con- nected with education. No purpose connected with education could be more distasteful to a farmer than the maintenance of an officer specially charged to see that he did not give work to children when there was work waiting to be done. If the Inspectors had been appointed under the Agricultural Child- ren's Act, they must have been paid out of the Consolidated Fund. The Conservative party would probably have had no objection to this plan, but the Conservative leaders knew per- fectly well that it would lay them open to an unanswerable taunt. 'Under the Elementary Education Act,' it would have been said, 'the means of enforcing school attendance must be provided at the cost of the locality. You have chosen to please the clergy by providing a distinct means of enforcing sohool attendance in the case of a particular class of children, and in order to save yourself the unpopularity of imposing a new rate, you charge the expense on the Treasury. If towns wish to see
school attendance made compulsory, theymust pay for the privi- lege. It is only the country clergy that are allowed to fill their schools at the cost of the nation at large.' To escape this dilemma in the future, the authors of the Act took the only course open to them. They launched it upon the world totally unprovided with any means of ensuring obedience to its provisions. It went out into the agricultural world a very sheep among wolves. The farmers knew what it was to disobey a law at their own risk, but to disobey a law without running any risk was a new and even a pleasing sensation ; and as new sensa- tions are scarce in agricultural districts, the condition of agri- cultural children under the Act specially designed for their benefit is, in most cases, rather worse than it was before the Act was passed. The farmer's dislike of interference has been appealed to, in addition to his desire to get children to work for him whenever he wants them.
The lesson of all this is, that in promoting elementary ,education, as in everything else, success demands single- ness of eye. The authors of the Agricultural Children's Act genuinely wished to see the labourers' children better taught,—for that much we willingly give them credit. But they wished, at the same time, to make this one tiny stone do double duty. The lay view of the Act was -that it ought to be an example of that cardinal doctrine of the Conservative party, that no new burden shall be laid on the rates. The clerical view of the Act was that it ought to serve as a bulwark to that new commandment of the Church of Eng- land,—Educate the poor as well as you can, but, above all, take care that nobody else educates them. For the time, no doubt, both these ends have been attained. The Agricultural Children's Act has been a very cheap Act for every one, except the children whom it has left in ignorance. And it has provided the plea, in answer to Mr. Dixon, that before taking any further step in this direction, it will be well to wait and see the effect of this last attempt to get the rose of school attendance without the thorns of direct compulsion. It remains to be seen how long Parliament will allow its cora- l:A:tends to be disobeyed, in the comfortable and well-grounded conviction that no harm will come of it. That the farmers have no thought of resisting the law is shown by the example of Surrey, and some of the Midland Counties, where the police, who have been instructed by the magistrates to see that the Act is obeyed, have apparently found no difficulty in enforcing it. The agricultural position in the matter is, that the law is an inconvenient one, and that being inconvenient, they do not intend to obey it until they are made to do so. In this respect the farmers are certainly no worse than the rest of us ; the only persons in fault are the legislators, who chose to assume that they would be better than the rest of us. Nor will it dis- pose them to yield a more willing obedience to the law, to find that all that the Act does is to transfer children to another sphere of labour. Farmers are prevented from employing them, so they find employment in other ways. This is the inevitable effect of the indirect compulsion of employers, when used as a substitute for instead of an auxiliary to the direct compulsion of parents.
If the "West-Country Parson" had frankly owned that he disliked "meddling" with farmers who break the law, and that so unpleasant a task ought not to be imposed on the Clergy by a side-wind, we should have made no comment on so natural a desire to escape a duty which he has never expressly under- -taken to perform. But when he defends his non-performance on the ground that to " meddle " would nullify any influence for good he may at present have with the farmers of his parish, we must take leave altogether to differ from him. No influence for good that deserves to be dignified by that name can be lost by a clergyman insisting that the law shall be obeyed, especially when that law is one which so directly concerns him. What law can more directly concern the parson of a parish, than one which enacts that no child shall be suffered to remain in ignorance of everything which it is most essential he should know ? A clergyman who knows that such a law is being broken under his very eyes, and takes no step to enforce it, can- not expect his parishioners to believe him when he preaches to them about the value of education. Unpopular as interference might make him for a time, it would cer- tainly make him more respected in the long-run. If the 4‘ West Country Parson" wants any further encouragement to do what he can to get the law put in operation against this offending farmer, he may find it in the reflection that the catastrophe which he risks is really not worth crying about. A man who keeps a boy of eleven from school on week-days and Sundays because he gets his labour cheap, may be set
down as still outside the region within which clerical influence serves any useful end.
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