Lobbying for a royal commission

In November 1882, Manning wrote to the Conservative politician, Sir Richard CrossFootnote ¹² suggesting that groups supporting denominational education be mobilized: ‘The course to take would seem to me first to agitate all over the country… The Church of England, the Catholic Church and the Dissenters who still care for religious Education, if they act together, might rouse the country.’Footnote ¹³ Manning launched his campaign in December of that same year with the first in a series of three articles in the journal The Nineteenth Century: ‘Is the Education Act of 1870 a Just Law?’. In this campaign, it is important to note both the continuity of his opinions on the education question since 1870, and also the changes. In both, Manning continued to manifest in his opinions and in his actions a commitment to engage the liberal state. This commitment, as we shall see, had effects on his own position, but also on what he expected of the liberal state in its relations to the churches.

By 1882, Manning seemed willing to admit a more direct interest of the state in education than he had in 1870. ‘Putting away all ecclesiastical questions,’ he wrote in the first of his Nineteenth Century articles, ‘it cannot be denied that the State is justified in providing for the education of its people.’Footnote ¹⁴ It had both a right, to protect itself from ignorance and vice, and a duty, to protect children from the neglect of their parents and to guard their right to education, to do so. Where it had rights and duties, the state could levy taxes to discharge its duties. But where the state had rights, the people had correlative rights. The whole people had a right to share in the beneficial use of taxation raised for education in forms that they could make use of. If one form of education would satisfy all, well and good. But if no one form of education, secular or religious, would satisfy the various denominations and also unbelievers, then ‘many and various forms of education ought to be equally admitted, and equally allowed to stand on the same ground before the law.’Footnote ¹⁵ Every association ‘having public and distinct existence, already recognized by the law, should be recognized also as a unit for the purposes of education, and, being so recognized, therefore admitted to a participation in the education rate.’ Government would always have full inspection, and ratepayers ‘due control and audit of accounts.’Footnote ¹⁶

There are obvious developments in Manning’s thinking on education in this passage beyond a specification of the rights of the state. There is a recognition that the pluralism of English civil society now included unbelievers, who were appropriately accommodated by the provision of a purely secular education which Manning had not foreseen in 1870. There is the admission, which Manning had resisted in 1870, that, in addition to inspection by the central government, the ratepayers themselves might exercise ‘due control’ over the schools they helped pay for, whether those schools were secular or religious.

It is against the background, therefore, of some considerable accommodation to the interest of the state in education and to the pluralist character of English society, that Manning made his demands on the state for the interest of the churches in education. These did not involve a repeal of the 1870 Act. Manning was at some pains to point out that this would be impossible, and that he accepted the Act and the principles it embodied. What he objected to was the ‘present way of carrying out the Act [as] open to the censure of inequality and injustice.’Footnote ¹⁷ Basically, his objection came down to the double unfairness of taxing the whole community to pay for secular schools that the majority did not use; while the religious schools that educated most English children were disadvantaged in having no access to the rate.

It is possible to consider Manning disingenuous in objecting to an aspect of the operation of the 1870 Act for which he himself was partly responsible: the withdrawal of the possibility of rate aid for voluntary schools in return for their exemption from control by school boards. But he could fairly reply that it had not been anticipated, either by himself or by the framers of the Act, that an amply funded board system would become a real rival to the voluntary system that had been intended as the basis for national education.

Nor would it be fair to think that Manning’s sole concern in his campaign to revise the operation of the Act was to place Catholic schools on the rates — although, of course, the financial stability of Catholic schools had to be very high on his agenda. For there are important aspects of Manning’s campaign to revise the Act that are inexplicable solely in terms of Catholic self-interest, and which can only be understood in the larger context of a developing agenda for the relationship of the churches with the liberal state.

Voluntarism

The first aspect of Manning’s campaign that needs explanation beyond the context of Catholic self-interest is his continued insistence on the importance of the voluntary principle in education - not just in the ‘voluntary’ (i.e., the denominational) system, but, as it turns out, in the board system as well. Manning had no desire to put the financing of Catholic and other denominational schools entirely on the rates, and wished to maintain both the fees paid by parents and the need to rely on the generosity of congregations. He consistently opposed proposals to eliminate fees and to make elementary education free, whether in voluntary or in board schools, except for the special case of parents who through poverty could not pay them.Footnote ¹⁸ This was a matter of principle. Manning believed that parental rights in the education of their children carried with them certain responsibilities: among them, to pay what they could for that education. He was particularly concerned that excusing parents from the responsibility of paying for their children’s education would eventually lead to diminished recognition of parental rights, and, worse than that, to the assumption of those rights by the state.Footnote ¹⁹

It was not only, however, in the interest of the right relationship between parents and the state that Manning opposed education that was fully funded by the state. He was a defender of the voluntary principle because he believed it was essential to the maintenance of the limited, and, therefore, authentically ‘liberal’ character of the liberal state. The voluntary system was, in Manning’s view, ‘a moral power which no public money could create.’ He had every confidence that the ‘energy, zeal, and self-denial of the voluntaries, if it only had fair play and equal aid from the public revenues in grants and rates, would outstrip the Board schools in multiplication and efficiency.’Footnote ²⁰ In his second article in The Nineteenth Century, ‘Religion and the Rates,’ Manning went even further in advocacy of voluntarism, recommending it not only for denominational schools, but as a constituent part of any national system of education for board schools as well. ‘I would give,’ he wrote in this article, ‘to the Board schools a share in the school rate in proportion to the voluntary contributions of those who desire to found such schools. This would at once spread the wholesome principle of voluntaryism all over the land.’Footnote ²¹ A fortiori he expected voluntary schools to continue to rely on contributions, even when aided from the rates, and recognized that it would probably be more ‘equitable to require that the contributions should be larger and the school rate less than in Board schools.’Footnote ²²

It was not, of course, politically expedient to disclaim full or even proportionate rate aid for Catholic schools, nor, indeed, to suggest that board schools should be forced to seek voluntary contributions. Political wisdom would have indicated the course of initially claiming full-funding for Catholic schools then settling for less, and not alienating supporters of secular education with the proposal that they, too, should be made to seek contributions. But, here again, voluntarism in education was a matter of principle, and is only intelligible from the perspective of Manning’s position on the right relationship between the liberal state and voluntary associations, religious and otherwise. For as we have seen, Manning believed that it was only the vigorous operation of these associations that would insure true liberalism, and mitigate the tendency of the national state toward centralism, statism and bureaucracy. Voluntarism in education would ‘develop as much as possible the energy, generosity, zeal, self-respect, self-help of the people of England.’ Education that was wholly state-funded ‘will kill all these highest qualities of a free people, and burden us with a mechanical, automatous, educational bureaucracy worked from a centre with clouds of paid officials.’ The example of Germany and France, with their highly centralized educational bureaucracies, was what Manning believed Englishmen would most wish to avoid.Footnote ²³

That the struggle over national education was, for Manning, essentially a struggle over the nature of the liberal state, is even clearer in the last of the articles on education that Manning contributed to The Nineteenth Century: ‘Is the Christianity of England Worth Preserving?’ Rather than responding to the criticism his first two articles had provoked, or, indeed, addressing directly the need to amend the Act of 1870, Manning chose instead to reflect on the significance for England of the experience of state involvement in education in two other ‘liberal’ states: the United States and France. These two countries were examples, respectively, of the ‘common’ school system and centralized state control of education.

The common school system of the United States was the equivalent of what supporters of the board schools wanted to establish in England as the ‘national system’ — and the only system entitled to state support — that is, a system of universal, free, compulsory, non-sectarian, secular education. Calling on the testimony of American observers, some Catholic, others not, Manning claimed that such a system had not only proved itself injurious to religion in the United States, but had serious negative effects on both private morality and public virtue. The former effect was inevitable in a system that conceived of education merely as instruction devoid of moral guidance; as far as public virtue was concerned, instead of contributing to it, public education in the United States had ‘passed rapidly into municipal politics, and become an engine at once of political corruption and social deterioration.’Footnote ²⁴ The error of the American system that brought such evils in its wake, according to Manning, was that it did not acknowledge or permit the exercise of responsibility on the part of those most concerned in the education of children: their parents. In the absence of effective parental involvement, organized through voluntary associations like churches, the imperative for moral education of children beyond simple instruction was lost.

It was, however, the French example of state intervention in education that Manning found the most disturbing, both for the impact on religious education in an ostensibly Catholic country, and also for the zeal to follow the French lead that he detected in some of England’s foremost Liberal politicians. For the French example, more than the American, impacted on the character of the liberal state and its relation to subsidiary and voluntary associations like the churches. As with the American, the French system of national education claimed to be secular. In the American case, secular meant non-sectarian - the simple absence of religion from public education. In France, the notion of the secular was activist: aimed in the first instance at excluding religion from national education, and including legislation forbidding members of Catholic religious orders to teach. Second, secularism in France meant the creation, through the laicization of education – Manning had to quote the French word laïcisation since the English word did not yet exist – of the école neutre. The école neutre was not the secular school of the English board system, in which, after all, the Bible was taught, even if from a ‘non-sectarian’ point of view. The école neutre, by Manning’s account, stood for aggressively anti-religious, anti-Christian education whose goal was to accomplish what in debates over education in the French National Assembly was called ‘the moral unity of France’. One deputy had defined this unity as ‘the unity of unbelief, the unity of positivism, the unity of independent morality’.Footnote ²⁵ Manning had at least to admire the candidness of French liberals who repudiated liberty of instruction – the right of religious congregations to found or conduct their own schools. But he quoted with approval a French observer who concluded that the effect of recent French legislation in the area of education was essentially to establish a religion of the state.Footnote ²⁶

The denial of liberty in the name of liberalism; the effort to eliminate the freedom of voluntary associations like the Church, especially in the area of education, and to put in its place a system that inculcated a religion of the state: these were to Manning signs of that betrayal of true liberalism and of the Caesarism, or imperialism, of the national state, that he had recognized in the case of the Kulturkampf.Footnote ²⁷As with the Vatican Decrees controversy, however, it was the danger that English liberal politicians sought to imitate foreign examples that most concerned him.Footnote ²⁸ Manning was able to quote to good effect recent pronouncements of Joseph Chamberlain,Footnote ²⁹ President of the Board of Trade in the Liberal government, illustrating the latter’s admiration for the educational policies that had been carried out in France by Léon Gambetta.Footnote ³⁰ By juxtaposing Chamberlain’s speeches with the statements of the sponsors of the 1870 Act, Manning illustrated that the purposes of Chamberlain and his allies were nowhere near the intentions of the framers of the Act: ‘The Act of 1870,’ he concluded:

The Act of 1870 had intended the cooperation of government and the voluntary efforts of the people, but had inadvertently given occasion first for the separation and eventually for the antagonism of these two agencies. Manning’s programme for national education was, therefore, to restore cooperation between government and voluntary agencies. All schools, religious and secular, would be assisted from the rates in respect of the secular part of their instruction in some proportion to voluntary effort. This cooperation would have the mutually reinforcing effects of both lowering the rates and stimulating voluntary giving. It would increase both the extension and the efficiency of education. And rather than imposing an artificial and forced ‘moral unity’ on a religiously divided nation, the cooperation Manning proposed would foster ‘the moral union of a free people educating themselves by self-help and the public aid of the Commonwealth in liberty of conscience and a healthy diversity of culture.’Footnote ³² For Manning, this would be a system of national education that was an expression of true liberalism in a pluralist society.

The Commission

Manning’s campaign for the amendment of the 1870 Act had its most significant success in the appointment, in January 1886, by the short-lived Conservative government, of a Royal Commission, often known as the Cross Commission, after its chairman, Manning’s ally, Sir Richard Cross. The charge of the Commission was ‘to enquire into the working of the Elementary Education Acts, England and Wales’ and to make recommendations. Manning himself was named as a member of the Commission, and there is little doubt that both the appointment of the Commission and Manning’s membership were in part due to Manning’s campaign and especially his intervention in the General Election of 1885. In the lead up to that election, Manning had written an article, published in the Dublin Review and a number of other Catholic periodicals, in which he called on Roman Catholic voters in England to put two questions to all parliamentary candidates. They were to ask, ‘Will you do your utmost to place Voluntary schools on an equal footing with Board schools?’ and ‘Will you do your utmost to obtain a Royal Commission to review the present state of education in England and Wales and especially the Act of 1870 and its administration by the School Boards?’Footnote ³³ This was, of course, the same election in which Charles Stewart Parnell instructed Irish voters in England to vote against the Liberal party because of their failure to support Irish Home Rule. The respective impact of Manning’s and Parnell’s interventions on the election outcome has been subject to debate among historians,Footnote ³⁴ but the outcome was clear enough. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives emerged from the election without a majority, and the Irish Nationalists held the balance of power. Lord Salisbury formed a government which lasted only a few months, but long enough to appoint the Commission. The revelation of Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule, the ‘Hawarden kite,’ in December 1885, won the Irish to the Liberal side and Salisbury’s government fell.Footnote ³⁵

The Cross Commission was carefully balanced among the interests concerned. Of the twenty-three members, fifteen were supporters of the voluntary system: eleven Anglicans; two Roman Catholics (Manning, and at first an Irish Catholic M.P., then the Duke of Norfolk); two Nonconformists - one Methodist and one Quaker - and supporters of denominational education. The eight other members of the Commission were advocates of the School Board system, mostly in the interest of the majority of Nonconformist opinion, which opposed rate aid to denominational education. It was not difficult to predict that the Commission would find it impossible to come to agreement, and, in the end, a majority and a minority report were presented to Parliament in August of 1888.

The recommendations of the majority report of the Cross Commission, especially the recommendation that rate aid be extended to denominational education, were not initially adopted by the Conservative government which had returned to power in July 1886 following the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill and the split in the Liberal party. On the one hand, the government had the excuse that the Commission itself was divided in its recommendations; on the other, the recent accession to the Conservatives of the Liberal Unionists, including Chamberlain, made the acceptance or rate aid for denominational education politically unfeasible for Salisbury’s government. The real significance of the majority report, however, is that it formed the basis of the Education Act of 1902, which finally resolved the education difficulty by admitting the principle of rate-aid for denominational education that the majority had advocated.

Manning’s work on the Royal Commission has been described in detail by D. E. Selby and Eric G. Tenbus.Footnote ³⁶ Selby documents the leading role Manning played in the discussions among the supporters of denominational education that led to the majority report. Voluntarism remained an important element of the majority’s position, although only for voluntary schools, which were to be aided from the rates in proportion to voluntary subscriptions. As might be predicted, the principle was not extended to board schools.

Denominational cooperation and local control

In addition to voluntarism, Manning’s involvement in the work of the Commission, and in the subsequent campaign for the adoption of its recommendations, illustrates two other important principles of his thinking on church-state relations. One of these was continuous with a stance Manning had taken as early as the 1860s: his conviction that in a secular state and in a civil society characterized by religious pluralism, it was both appropriate and necessary for Christian churches to cooperate in pursuit of common goals. The second was a new line of thought that Manning had developed in the course of wrestling with the education question since 1870. This was the importance of localism and decentralization in government, especially in the area of education. The emerging importance of decentralization for Manning is most obvious in his work on the Commission. His commitment to sustaining a united front among the denominations is clearest in the subsequent campaign to secure the adoption of the Commission’s recommendations. As in the case of voluntarism, both the maintenance of a common front among the churches, and the campaign for decentralization in education presented choices between the immediate interests of the Catholic Church or of denominational educational on the one hand, and a vision of the right relationship between the churches and the liberal state on the other hand. Manning’s choices in both these areas had in view the larger context.

In 1870, Manning had indicated to Gladstone his willingness to see denominational education excluded from assistance from the rates in order not to be answerable to the new local school boards. He had taken this position because of the unfortunate experiences he had had dealing with the anti-Catholicism of local bodies like the Poor Law Guardians. In return, voluntary schools had been compensated by an increase in grants from the central government. Manning concurred in this arrangement. In 1870, he had expected better treatment for Catholic and other denominational schools from the central government than he did from the local boards.Footnote ³⁷

The financial effects on the voluntary system of abstention from the receipt of rate aid have already been noted, and may go some way to explaining Manning’s willingness in the 1880s to revisit the question of local control. However, in his work on the Commission, there is an eagerness to explore the issue of local control that goes beyond the desire to place denominational education on a firmer financial footing and led him to propose what was, in effect, a comprehensive scheme for the reform of national education. To understand this development, we must attend both to Manning’s growing concern about centralization, and to the contemporaneous interest in local government in British political life in general.

We have seen that as early as the first of his Nineteenth Century articles in 1882, Manning was prepared to entertain the prospect of ‘due control’ on the part of rate payers in exchange for rate assistance for voluntary schools. However, by 1885, he saw in the growing movement in favor of reform of local government an opportunity for local control of education without the disadvantages of possibly idiosyncratic school boards.Footnote ³⁸ In a secret memorandum to Lord Salisbury immediately after the election of 1885, Manning proposed that the contemplated new county authorities might have jurisdiction over, and ability to support through a county education rate, elementary education (as it was anticipated that they would have control of secondary and technical education).Footnote ³⁹

In offering Salisbury reasons for this proposal, Manning cited first the danger that the grants from central government that were then available to voluntary education might one day diminish or cease, and so put voluntary schools at even greater financial risk than they already were through denial of the rate. But Manning’s second reason for now wanting local financing and control of education is significant: the danger ‘that the control of a central fund by Government may become the most powerful means of a central and despotic Government Education like that of France’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed, Manning foresaw explicitly that Chamberlain (then still in the Liberal party) might try to use the power of the central government over grants to undermine the position of voluntary schools.Footnote ⁴¹ Selby states that Manning saw devolution as an effective antidote against Chamberlainism.Footnote ⁴² There is, of course, irony in the suggestion also made by Selby that the idea for devolution in education first came to Manning from Chamberlain’s own scheme for an Irish Central Board with powers in the field of education that it shared with county boards. Both Selby and Conor Cruise O’Brien believe that Manning supported Chamberlain’s scheme because it would protect the Irish denominational system from Radicals, and Selby argues that from 1885 onwards, he applied this thinking to the English context.Footnote ⁴³

Manning’s new emphasis on decentralization at the county level offered him a way of addressing the difficult issue of local inspection. For, although he was now willing to admit the principle of local inspection for the sake of obtaining rate aid for denominational education, this was not true of other supporters of the voluntary system, including some of Manning’s co-religionists. A number of Anglican witnesses who testified before the Commission opposed accepting rate aid, because of fears regarding interference in their schools by the rate-payers should they be given the right of inspection.Footnote ⁴⁴ So too did T.W. Allies, Secretary of the Catholic Poor School Committee,Footnote ⁴⁵ the chief association for the support of Catholic elementary education.

Manning’s solution for avoiding these dangers was first proposed in the secret memorandum to Lord Salisbury. The responsibility for inspection could be placed jointly in the hands of the Education Department and the proposed county authorities, who might coopt for this purpose representatives of the district in which a school was located. The danger of undue interference in the religious character of the voluntary schools would be obviated because the limits of inspection in the case of agencies like the Education Department or larger and more democratic but still local assemblies like the county councils would be specified in statute law.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the open forum of the Commission, Manning questioned witnesses like Allies about the feasibility of this scheme, where the latter confessed to ‘great distrust of the ratepayers in anything that concerns religious feeling and principle.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Manning was not discouraged, and as the Commission majority prepared its report, he worked closely with his fellow Commissioner, Sir Francis Sandford,Footnote ⁴⁸ former Secretary of the Education Department, to compose a memorandum whose ideas about decentralization and local control amounted to a radical overhaul of the educational system as it then existed.

The Local Government Reform Bill had recently (1888) been introduced into Parliament by Salisbury’s government. Sandford’s memorandum, entitled ‘Memorandum as to Mode of Bringing Education within the Scope of the Local Government Bill’, proposed that in addition to the educational powers already envisioned for the County Councils, they should be given jurisdiction over the whole of elementary education — both voluntary and board schools — and that the local school boards should be abolished. The councils would assist all schools out of the rates, and might appoint local ratepayers to the management committees of voluntary schools.Footnote ⁴⁹ These were, of course, substantially Manning’s ideas at least from the time of his 1885 memorandum to Lord Salisbury, but as systematized in Sandford’s memorandum, they amounted to a significant new departure in the administration, financing and management of national education. The propositions envisaged that a third of the members of a Committee of management might be appointed by the Council; that their powers would be limited to audit, the material and sanitary state of buildings and ‘the general moral conduct of the children and the teachers;’ and that decision on all religious and moral questions be reserved to the bishop. The provision of a one to three proportion of County Council versus denominational appointments on the management committees of voluntary schools was a feature of the 1902 Education Act that granted rate aid to denominational schools.Footnote ⁵⁰

In April of 1888, Manning was able to secure the approval of the Catholic bishops for ratepayer participation in the inspection and even management of Catholic schools on condition of county council supervision.Footnote ⁵¹ The majority caucus of the Commission, however, was not so easily convinced. Their report endorsed rate aid, but when it came to the critical proposal for the transfer of responsibility for elementary education to the County Councils, they balked. Their statement is itself an indication of their indecision:

On the subject of opening the management of voluntary schools to include local ratepayers, the report was silent.

The most complete statement by Manning of the importance of localism and decentralization in education, and indeed his last major statement on education before his death, is his 1889 Fortnightly Review article on the just-completed work of the Commission, ‘The Education Commission and the School Rate.’ Decentralization in education was so important, Manning wrote, because education was essentially a popular and local duty: ‘The efficient education of children is the first and chief need of every locality, and it returns upon all its homes as one of the most precious local and public benefits.’Footnote ⁵³ He was convinced that the quality of family life among the great mass of the people, which he believed to be under increasing threat from causes like drink and bad housing,Footnote ⁵⁴ would be significantly improved by engaging parents in local communities in the responsibility for the education of their children.

In his Fortnightly article, Manning expressed concern that the Anglican bishops and the National Society, the association for the support of Anglican voluntary schools, had recently come out against the recommendation of the Commission majority on rate aid because of continuing concern over the question of inspection. However, he believed that ‘[once] the report of the Royal Commission has been read and laid to heart, and the County Councils are in activity and the work of decentralization is accomplished,’ the hesitant would come around. The County Councils would be the instrument for ‘uniting in one common administration all statutory elementary schools, tak[ing] up into their own hands the two systems that are now unhappily in conflict.’ The creation of a single, decentralized system of national education that encompassed both denominational and secular schools would see the end of the conflicts over religion that had blocked educational progress: ‘We shall then have justice, and a national system of education worthy of the name. Then the inextinguishable religious divisions of our country may find perfect liberty of action and a reconciliation in mutual respect.’Footnote ⁵⁵

Manning believed that it was only a matter of time before the recommendations of the Commission majority, plus the separate recommendation for the reorganization of education under county control, would be enacted in law:

In this prediction he turned out to be a prophet, although, like Moses, he would not enter into that promised land. The Education Act that Manning did not live to see was essentially the enactment of the Royal Commission’s key recommendation of rate aid for denominational eduction, and the proposal advanced by Manning and Sandford in their memorandum that a system of national education should be administered through the county councils.

Denouement

It is ironic that it was precisely the issue of decentralization and local control that split the unity of the religious groups in favor of voluntary education and severely tested Manning’s commitment to a common, cross-denominational front. Manning fought hard, both in his campaign to amend the 1870 Act, and, once on the Commission, to maintain a united front among Catholics, Churchmen and the minority of Nonconformists who favored voluntary education. D.E. Selby describes in detail the role Manning played in organizing and coordinating the majority caucus on the Commission and ensuring that the majority report was as broad a consensus as was possible.Footnote ⁵⁷ When the Commission’s report was published, all the Anglicans but one who were members of the Commission majority had supported the call for rate-aid of denominational education.Footnote ⁵⁸ But the exception was portentous, for the lone dissenter, as had become clear from testimony before the Commission, represented a powerful sentiment within the Anglican Church. The Anglican fear was that, under existing arrangements — which still involved the school boards, since the role of the new county councils, if any, in elementary education was by no means settled — acceptance of rate aid would still be accompanied by the possibility of unsympathetic, even hostile local inspection.

Manning, it will be recalled, had faced similar dissent in his own community, but was able to overcome it and secure the full adherence of the Roman Catholic bishops to the majority report in October 1888. With an Anglican National Society meeting scheduled for November, and rejection of the rate-aid recommendation a real possibility, Manning and his Anglican allies consulted. He recommended that they seek to delay the National Society’s taking a position on rate aid, urging the line that the recommendations of a commission that had deliberated for two years needed further study. From his later Fortnightly Review article, we know that Manning was hoping that with time, the devolution of powers on the county councils would allay Anglican fears of local inspection. Manning’s fellow commissioners put the case at the meeting, but, unfortunately, the National Society was unwilling to wait, and came out against rate aid.

It was with the possibility of Anglican rejection of the majority recommendation on rate aid in prospect that Manning had been approached in October 1888 by Edward Lyulph Stanley, a fellow commissioner, but of the minority.Footnote ⁵⁹ Stanley was a Liberal politician and chairman of the executive committee of the National Education Association, the successor organization to Chamberlain’s National Education League. He wished to detach Manning and the Catholics from the Establishment in their support of voluntary schools, and to this end he was willing to promise special treatment for Catholic schools. ‘You will see that the Church party has not welcomed the idea of aid from the rates,’ Stanley wrote to Manning. ‘I wish your views of policy could have led you to make reasonable terms with the Liberals for the Catholics, and not identify yourself with the Established Church. I am sure more can be done by diplomacy and keeping out of the political struggle waged through ecclesiastical forms which is going on between the Church of England and the Liberal party, than by sinking or swimming with the Established Church.’ And Stanley was prepared to offer an incentive: ‘I am sure the end of all the agitation will not be favorable to the denominational voluntary system; and I should be glad to treat your schools specially. I beg you to consider whether it is not possible for you to take a line which will enable us to draw a distinction between you and the ordinary denominationalists.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Manning’s reply to Stanley is not known, but certainly he did not take the offer up. He did reveal the contents of Stanley’s letter to one of his closest Anglican allies, Francis Sandford, who accurately labelled it ‘bribery.’Footnote ⁶¹

Though the government did not move to adopt the recommendations of the Commission, Manning did not give up his campaign for a common system of national education; nor did the rejection of rate aid by the National Society lead him to abandon a cross-denominational front. Immediately after the National Society meeting, he issued a pamphlet entitled ‘Fifty Reasons why the Voluntary Schools of England ought to share the School Rates,’ and had it distributed to Salisbury’s cabinet, his fellow commissioners in the majority and to other religious and educational leaders.Footnote ⁶² He followed up this initiative early in the next year with the Fortnightly Review article, ‘The Education Commission and the School Rate.’ Both pamphlet and article rehearsed the reasons for granting rate aid to denominational education, and sought particularly to reassure Anglicans by insisting that the devolution of authority over education to the county councils would not be injurious to denominational schools. Once the county councils were formed and functioning, Manning insisted, the point of placing voluntary schools under their auspices would become clearer, and ‘the Managers of Voluntary Schools will see that not only justice, but their own safety, will depend upon some further legislation which shall be equal, uniform and common to all.’Footnote ⁶³

In the judgment of the historian who has done most to describe Manning’s work on the Royal Commission, his role there and the influence of his ideas, even after his death, on the formulation and eventual passage of the 1902 Education Act, ‘entitled him to a central place in the history of English education.’Footnote ⁶⁴ The 1902 Act created the common system of national education that Manning had hoped for, giving religious schools, finally, access to the rates while preserving the voluntary principle. As Manning had predicted, the county councils, once established, eventually took on more and more responsibility for various aspects of education, until the continued existence of local school boards began to look anomalous, both in terms of administrative efficiency and the improvement of elementary education. The 1902 Act abolished school boards, and established the County and County Borough Councils as the local education authorities, just as Sandford’s memorandum had recommended. Local control and decentralization were further reinforced by the provision that two representatives of the local authority would join four denominational representatives on the management committee of voluntary schools. This was, of course, both a provision and a proportion that Manning had favored and the Catholic bishops had endorsed as early as April of 1888. Finally, it should be noted that the provisions of the 1902 Act applied to all denominational schools across the board, Anglican as well as Roman Catholics. By resisting the bribe of separate treatment for Roman Catholic schools, Manning blocked the divide and conquer strategy of the secularists and ensured that a common system, once established, would operate in the interest of all religious schools.Footnote ⁶⁵

Engaging the liberal state

It is possible to represent Manning’s ultimately successful campaign for denominational education as a victory for the churches and a defeat for those who wished to secularize education. This is how it has been seen by those who have written the history of Manning’s involvement in education, and no doubt this portrayal is a salutary corrective to the dominant myth of unimpeded secularization in the second half of the nineteenth century. There are grounds for such an interpretation in D.E. Selby’s conclusion that the campaign for religious education succeeded because it ultimately convinced so many that the monopoly of board schools over public funds was an impediment to national and social progress, and that the denial of rate aid to denominational education was a result of nothing so much as the bigotry of secularists.Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed, from this perspective, Manning and his allies had worked a striking reversal in the court of public opinion, turning on their opponents the very accusations that had been directed against themselves.

It should, however, be apparent that the issues surrounding the question of state aid for voluntary schools were far more complex, and motivations of Manning far more nuanced than an explanation in terms of secularization or its opposite would allow. Of course, Manning and others who thought like him valued religious education for its own sake and wished to see it survive and prosper. And of course they opposed in the public forum those who wanted to secularize education in what they believed to be still a predominantly Christian country. But, as religious leaders, they accepted the liberal state and they were prepared to recognize and operate within the ‘ground rules’ of the liberal state in regard to churches: that the state would be neutral in its treatment of denominations, now including those of no religious belief; and that in a pluralistic society it was not acceptable for any group to seek unfair advantage by monopolizing the power or resources of the state. The latter, of course, is precisely what Manning accused the supporters of secular education of doing and one of the reasons he opposed them so strongly.

But a religious leader like Manning had larger concerns about the relationship between the churches and the liberal state. We have seen that Manning drew a distinction between what he considered authentic liberalism and the policy of so-called liberals who supported the Kulturkampf in Germany or opposed liberty of instruction in France. Authentic liberalism, in so many ways the result of the ‘desecration’ or secularization of society as Manning understood it,Footnote ⁶⁷ had, therefore, as one of its raisons d'être, respect for the diversity or pluralism of religious opinion within society. This respect entailed a fundamental restraint on the part of the liberal state from either interfering with the free exercise of religion or trying to usurp the role of the churches by setting up a rival religion of the state. The ability to educate children in the faith of their parents was, in Manning’s view, essential to the free exercise of religion. The establishment of a state-financed system of secular education which positively disadvantaged religious schools was, therefore, a violation of the very nature of liberalism.

By the end of his life, and as a result of his involvement in the whole education controversy, Manning had come to a further conclusion about what was necessary for true liberalism and to protect voluntary associations like the churches against the tyranny of the national state. To resist the tendency of the state to concentrate power in the hands of a centralized state bureaucracy and to ensure the restraint that was essential to true liberalism, he became a strong advocate of localism and decentralization in government. But it would be a mistake to see Manning’s advocacy of decentralization as adversarial in relation to the liberal state. We have seen that in education, it was through a commitment to decentralization that Manning found his way toward a more constructive model of what a collaborative relationship between government and voluntary agencies like the churches could be.

It is revealing, but finally not all that surprising, that in his last statement on the education question, the 1889 Fortnightly article, ‘The Education Commission and the School Rate,’ Manning’s star witness against a state monopoly in education and in favor of the voluntary principle in education is John Stuart Mill. For Manning, Mill represented ‘consistent’ or ‘genuine’ liberalism as contrasted with the ‘aggressive liberalism of today, born of the revolutionary despotism of France.’Footnote ⁶⁸ In the article, Manning quotes extensively from Mill’s On Liberty, citing the passages in which Mill denounces a state monopoly of education and speaks out strongly in favor of diversity. Mill is also a witness in favor of the voluntary principle, since he opposed using compulsory taxation to accomplish what could be done by individual initiative. It is, perhaps, uncertain that Manning’s willingness to seek rate aid for voluntary schools or accept county council participation in their management was consistent with Mill’s liberalism. But then, Mill’s was the liberalism of 1859, and by the late 1880s, it is arguable that others besides Manning, and true heirs of Mill’s liberalism, saw a greater role for government agencies, as long as the centripetal tendencies of the state were tempered by the restraint of decentralization and local control.