of national education. Local rates in aid of education existed in rare and sporadic cases, perhaps a century earlier than this; while it is interesting to note that in the colony of Massachusetts Bay as early as October 25, 1644, the general court granted a voluntary rate for the maintenance of poor scholars at Harvard College, and the Connecticut code of 1650 dealt with the whole question of rate-aided education. It is also well to remember that while this beginning of state and rate aid had almost died away in England before the beginning of the eighteenth century, yet the English crown in 1695 confirmed a New England statute creating a system of rate-aided education. The idea, however, soon vanished as completely in the American colonies as it did in the mother country. The restoration of Charles II. in 1660 sounded indeed the death note of the commonwealth conception of national education. It achieved as well an even more lamentable result, for it reduced the great Elizabethan system to a state of coma. Elizabeth, we have seen, insisted on religious conformity, but she did not allow this to interfere with her educational policy. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 and the Five Mile Act of 1665 seem to us to have been literally designed for the extinction of education. These acts involved such a peering into the lives of schoolmasters, such a course of inquisitorial folly, that the position became intolerable. Men would not become schoolmasters, and practically all secondary and (apart from a certain new movement to be referred to immediately) primary education ceased to exist. Education has no meaning when none but political and religious hypocrites are allowed to teach. The campaign against dissent and Roman Catholicism may possibly be defended on political grounds, but, from the point of view of national education, the result was lamentable. For the third time national education had been destroyed; it seemed hopeless to try and evolve a fourth system.
That fourth system, incorporating much of the wrecked materials of the old systems, is receiving its coping-stone to-day. We must, therefore, briefly trace its growth. The Uniformity legislation that followed the Restoration was so severe in character that a reaction or a revolt from its operation was inevitable. The decisions of the courts of justice were the first sign of this reaction. The courts held that a school-master, if he was a nominee of the founder or of the lay-patron of a school, could not be ejected from the school for teaching without the bishop's license (Bates's case, 1670); while it was decided in Cox's case in 1700 that there was not and never had been ecclesiastical control over any schools save grammar schools; that the church, in fact, had no control over elementary education. In Douse's case, decided in 1701, it was held that it was not a civil offence to keep an elementary school without the bishop's license. Hence the elementary school could escape the inquisition of the bishop whether imposed by statute or
