PASSIVE RESISTERS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 117, 19 May 1909, Page 6

PASSIVE RESISTERS.

Blocked on the one side by the Church of England and the House of Lords, and on the other by the Nonconformists, tho •British Government has decided, apparently, that a masterly inactivity is its best attitude towards the education question during the present session. Inaction will, at any rate, be as productive as the exhaustive labours of which tMr. Birrell's Education Bill of 1906 was the subject — labours which were rendered absolutely futile by the short shrift given to the measure by the House of •Lords — and it will take a good deal less time. But this easy policy is now provoking hostilities from the opposite quarter. Passive resistance has become a thing of the past during the last two or three years, not because the obnoxious I -measures for which Mr. Balfour's Government were responsible have been repealed, but because the present Government, and a large majority of the present Parliament, are pledged to repeal them. First Mr. Birrell's Bill and then iMr. IM'Keima's held out hopes that the principle of the public control of rateaided schools would be established, and even the compromise which Mr. Runciman was nearly successful in engineering, though it was distasteful to the more warlike of the Nonconformists, would ha-vo so divided their forces that they could hardly have taken the field again. But now that this compromise has shared the fate of its predecessors, and nearly six months have passed without the appearance of any other, hope deferred is naturally making them impatient, and Dr. Clifford to the fore again with a new Passive (Resistance League. It is impossible not to admire the wonderful energy displayed by Dr. Chffoid at a time of life when most men have long since had enough of fighting ; but the want of logic on the part of so clear a thinker and so fearless a fighter is also remarkable. As Sir Robert Stout and that powerful Nonconformist organ the ■British Weekly have both been reminding him, it is not a true equality that Dr. Clifford and his friends are chain•pioning when they seek to substitute their own religious manual, or any form of religious teaching at all, for denominational teaching in the public schools. Thece can be no equality and no peace until Church and Chapel are both deprived of their privileges in this respect, yet we do not hear of passive resistance on the part of the nonprivileged chss&s. It is only the partially privileged that make a fuss.