mist will enjoy the same emoluments, and
will, after the same term of service, obtain, on the same conditions,
the same retiring pension. I wish that some gentleman would, instead
of using vague phrases about religious liberty and the rights of
conscience, answer this plain question. Suppose that in one of our large
towns there are four schools, a school connected with the Church, a
school connected with the Independents, a Baptist school, and a Wesleyan
school; what encouragement, pecuniary or honorary, will, by our plan, be
given to the school connected with the Church, and withheld from any of
the other three schools? Is it not indeed plain that, if by neglect or
maladministration the Church school should get into a bad state, while
the dissenting schools flourish, the dissenting schools will receive
public money and the Church school will receive none?

It is true, I admit, that in rural districts which are too poor to
support more than one school, the religious community to which
the majority belongs will have an advantage over other religious
communities. But this is not our fault. If we are as impartial as it
is possible to be, you surely do not expect more. If there should be a
parish containing nine hundred churchmen and a hundred dissenters, if
there should, in that parish, be a school connected with the Church,
if the dissenters in that parish should be too poor to set up another
school, undoubtedly the school connected with the Church will, in that
parish, get all that we give; and the dissenters will get nothing. But
observe that there is no partiality to the Church, as the Church, in
this arrangement. The churchmen get public money, not because they
are churchmen, but because they are the majority. The dissenters get
nothing, not because they are dissenters, but because they are a small
minority. There are districts where the case will be reversed, where
there will be dissenting schools, and no Church schools. In such cases
the dissenters will get what we have to give, and the churchmen will get
nothing.

But, Sir, I ought not to say that a churchman gets nothing by a system
which gives a good education to dissenters, or that a dissenter gets
nothing by a system which gives a good education to churchmen. We are
not, I hope, so much conformists, or so much nonconformists, as to
forget that we are Englishmen and Christians. We all, Churchmen,
Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Methodists, have an intere