Page:The Extravagent Expenditure of the London School Board.djvu/14

 salaries, which a reference to the several minutes of the Board's transactions will show to be quite unprecedented.

For the purpose of comparison we have commenced with the accounts for the half-year ending Lady-day, 1874, as by that time the work of the Board would have reached its average dimensions. It must be borne in mind that these figures relate solely to the staff, and do not include the expenses connected with the enforcement of the compulsory bye-laws with which we cannot deal just now. For the half-year ending Lady-day, 18761874 [sic], we find that the salaries of the officers of the staff amounted to £2715, for the next half-year the amount is £4815; for Lady-day, 1875, £4850; for Michaelmas, 1875, £5252, and for the half-year ending Lady-day, 1876, £5653. Thus we find that within a period of two years, the salaries of the staff have more than doubled in amount, the work to be done remaining generally the same. That for the merely administrative purposes of the central office of the London School Board it should have been necessary to incur an expenditure in salaries of nearly £12,000 per annum, with a moral certainty of this being again exceeded, is a fact which certainly never occurred to those who, in the just and true interests of Public Elementary Education, approved of and applauded the Act of 1870.

The foregoing statements of facts and figures, gleaned from the accounts of the School Board for London, have been put together with a view to show that there is room for far greater economy than it has hitherto displayed; that in the interests of the Metropolitan ratepayers, no less than of the cause of Elementary Education, a protest and a stand should be made against the present system of expenditure—a system which, if carried further on to its extreme, would cause the name of School Boards to be a bye-word and reproach. There is no desire by partial statements or unfair criticisms to hinder the work of Education so ably inaugurated by the Act of 1870. But this Act was essentially a