Mr. Balfour has written a letter to a correspondent to
show that he never said that the Education Bill was intended to destroy School Boards and School Board schools. On the contrary, it was intended to preserve them so long as they do their work well. Indeed, what he did say was that the Bill proposed to set in working order a machinery by which School Boards might, and as he hoped, eventually would, be superseded by bodies under the direct management of the county or town municipalities,—a saying altogether different, and suggesting no attack on School Boards, but only a means of substituting a more natural and satisfactory mode of con- necting them with a general system of municipal organisation instead of leaving them in a position financially insulated from all the other agencies of popular government, and not even provided for with any regard to the other expenditure of the community. It would be as sensible to say that that is an attack on Board-schools, as it would be to declare that because a man who had pledged himself to give a specific sum towards the education of his children, hoped eventually to let that education be properly provided for in due pro- portion to his general income, he intended to starve their ' education that he might spend more in other ways.
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