en
sent out as special commissioner to inquire into the state of
education in the island; to modify Lord Harris's plan, however
excellent in itself; and to pass an Ordinance by which Government
aid was extended to private elementary schools, of whatever
denomination, provided they had duly certificated teachers; were
accessible to all children of the neighbourhood without distinction
of religion or race; and 'offered solid guarantees for abstinence
from proselytism and intolerance, by subjecting their rules and
course of teaching to the Board of Education, and empowering that
Board at any moment to cancel the certificate of the teacher.' In
the wards in which such schools were founded, and proved to be
working satisfactorily, the secular ward schools were to be
discontinued. But the Government reserved to itself the power of
reopening a secular school in the ward, in case the private school
turned out a failure.

Such is a short sketch of an Ordinance which seems, to me at least,
a rational and fair compromise, identical, mutatis mutandis, with
that embodied in Mr. Forster's new Education Act; and the only one
by which the lower orders of Trinidad were likely to get any
education whatever. It was received, of course, with applause by
the Roman Catholics, and by a great number of the Protestants of the
colony. But, as was to be expected, it met with strong expressions
of dissent from some of the Protestant gentry and clergy; especially
from one gentleman, who attacked the new scheme with an acuteness
and humour which made even those who differed from him regret that
such remarkable talents had no wider sphere than a little island of
forty-five miles by sixty. An accession of power to the Roman
Catholic clergy was, of course, dreaded; and all the more because it
was known that the scheme met with the approval of the Archbishop;
that it was, indeed, a compromise with the requests made in a
petition which that prelate had lately sent in to the Governor; a
petition which seems to me most rational and temperate. It was
argued, too, that though the existing Act--that of 1851--had more or
less failed, it might still succeed if Lord Harris's plan was fully
carried out, and the choice of the ward schoolmaster, the selection
of ward school-books, and the direction of the course of
instruction, were vested in local committees. The simple answer
was, that eighteen years had elapsed, and