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350 schools that desired to be inspected and gave to the county councils the power to pay for such inspection, thus bringing the councils into closer connection with the secondary system. The act also provided for the creation of a consultative committee (consisting as to two thirds of persons representing the views of universities and other bodies interested in education) for the purpose of framing a register of teachers throughout the country of all grades and for the general purpose of advising the Board of Education on technical educational matters. This committee is proving a most effective body, and it will soon be difficult for any school of repute to reject official inspection and for any schoolmaster of standing to withhold his name from the official register. The act also gave the Board of Education the capacity to take over and exercise any powers of the charity commissioners or of the board of agriculture relating to education. The vast powers exercised by the charity commissioners over the secondary endowed schools of the country under the endowed schools act of 1869 and the amending acts, were vested last August, by virtue of this provision, in the Board of Education. The result of this step was to make the Board of Education the supreme authority over both primary and secondary education and to bring it into touch with the county councils in relation to all secondary matters. The next obvious step was to replace the school boards by the county councils (and county borough councils) and thus make the local administrative authority an intermediary in the cases of all grades of education between the schools and the Board of Education. This is the great accomplishment, from the educational point of view, of the act of 1902. The school boards in their vain efforts to supply something of the nature of a secondary education were rapidly making confusion worse confounded. By the simple expedient of placing the local secondary authority—the county council—in the place of the school board, the principle of order and development was at once introduced into the national educational system. The supporters of the school boards—men who realized the admirable work that had been done by these boards, but who were unable to grasp the fact that that work could be more efficiently continued by bodies that had the interests of secondary as well as primary education at heart as part of a civic system—opposed the bill with fierce energy, and they were aided by all those who believed that the new bill was unduly helping the elementary denominational or voluntary schools. The government with respect to those schools was in a difficult position. The owners and managers of the schools claimed as of right assistance out of local rates on the ground that they were doing work which if they did not exist would have to be done by new schools built by a school board at great cost. They, however, refused to alter the denominational character of these schools. They declared that the