50a Albemarle Street, W. January 28, 1907.

THE January meetings have been productive of the usual amount of discussion, but the fate of the recent Education Bill seems to have cast a gloom over each assembly of experts in turn. One after another has deplored the fate of Lord Monkswell's amendment on registration, and if the assistant masters did make wry faces over the official recommendation of a one-column list of teachers, they at any rate swallowed it. So now that there is secured a practical unanimity on this point, we suppose that by some means or other a register will be compiled: but we are not at all certain that the millennium has begun, for all that. Still, it is something to have arrived at a starting-point for the compilation of a register. We English people talk fiercely enough about never yielding an inch where principle is involved, and yet no nation is more fond of compromise: so we are not without hope that the various unions and associations connected with education

may at length begin to subordinate their differences, and to unite on points vital to all.

At the headmasters' meeting there seemed to be an undercurrent of feeling antagonistic to the Board of Education which is, to say the least of it, unfortunate : we should be glad to think that it is undeserved. A rather sycophantic vote of thanks to its inspectors was parried by "the previous question," and the department's methods in connection with the presentation of reports and the drafting of schemes, to say nothing of its insatiable greed for statistics, came in for some severe criticism. Mr. Morant, in his speech at the dinner, claimed that the Board often stood in the way to protect a headmaster from the undue interference of a local authority, pointing out that it was part of the department's business to interpret the objects of true education to those who are only indifferently acquainted with them. This is, in a sense, an admission of the justice of Dr. Rendall's expression of regret that the old school boards who had learned something about education had been superseded by authorities more conversant with municipal or sanitary matters; at the same time it leaves on record the fact that friction does