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THE LORDS AND THE EDUCATION BILL.

The authors of the Education Bill may claim the unusual distinction of having started two great controversies, neither of which has any direct connection with the professed subject of the measure. Theological passion has been aroused by the Bill to a quite unusual degree. It would be untrue to say that the Church of England is united in preferring another plan to that offered by the Government, because whenever Churchmen have come together to consider the question, they have carefully avoided making any alternative proposal. They have seldom ventured to declare what is the real wish of many of them-that things should be left as they are; and they seem quite unable to say what would satisfy them short of this. But, though they may be divided on this point, they are almost of one mind as regards the demerits of the particular solution provided for them by Mr. Birrell, and even the minority among them who are ready to accept the Bill are anxious to amend it in some of its most vital provisions. The Roman Catholic opposition is equally strong, and in one respect more significant. The majority of Churchmen probably are Conservatives, and in that character they might possibly have found ground for complaint in any Education Bill introduced by the present Government. But, regarded as a Parliamentary force, the Roman Catholics have every desire to keep on good terms with the Liberal party. Their Parliamentary mouthpiece is Mr. Redmond, and his followers are the only section of the House in which they have any real influence. But the Government have succeeded in the difficult task of bringing English Catholics and Irish Nationalists into line. There was only one

question on which this could have been attempted with any success, and this question the Cabinet had ready. There is a fair amount of discontent with the Bill among Nonconformists, but this, for the most part, is of the manageable kind. Mr. Perks and his friends will complain, but they will submit. When we remember that the Bill is in name and profession a Bill to make better provision for the education of children under 14, and that the religious difficulty has all along been one of the chief hindrances to educational progress, it is really a triumph of perversity that the latest effort in educational legislation should have greatly enlarged the force and area of this particular obstacle.

A second difficulty has now been added. This time it comes from the Constitutional side. The Education Bill is distasteful to the Lords for more than one reason. The majority of the Peers sit on the Opposition side, and they are naturally disinclined to show favor to the principal measure of a Liberal Government in its first year of office. They belong to the classes which are most hostile to the social revolution which the Bill is likely to bring about in villages. And the presence of the bishops arms the Opposition with special knowledge, and with special anxiety to bring that knowledge to bear. The Bill is certain, therefore, to meet with very strong resistance in the Lords, and in all probability it will go back to the Commons with many of its features altered almost out of recognition. The Lords have wisely decided to read the Bill a second time. Of the conditions which could alone justify them in refusing this measure of courtesy-conditions which were satisfied in 1893, when they threw out the

second Home Rule Bill-only one is present now. The discussion of many of the clauses has been wholly inadequate to their importance. But the majorities by which each clause has been passed have been large, except in the one instance in which the Government left members free to vote as they liked, and there is no evidence of such general hostility to the Bill on the part of the electors as would lead them to sustain the Lords in rejecting it. To read the Bill a second time, however, is quite consistent with making large amendments in it in Committee, and this to all appearance the Lords are prepared to do. There is much in it, we can readily believe, which even the Government would willingly let go. The Bill is the result, probably, of a series of Cabinet compromises, and as each in turn has involved a surrender on the part of somebody, the section which has had to give way will not view with much displeasure the reappearance of provisions which it has vainly tried to retain or insert in the Bill. The object of the Lords, therefore, will be to discover the exact point to which the amending process may be carried without compelling the Government to withdraw the Bill. This is a very delicate operation, for there are not a few Liberals who would view the disappearance of the Bill with nothing more than a decent expression of conventional indignation. They are not so much in love with the Government proposals as to welcome the inevitable intrusion of ecclesiastical partisanship into municipal elections, to the equal injury of religion and of local administration, or to have forgotten-as Ministers seemingly have forgotten-that in legislation of this kind it is not enough to give this or that religious body what ought to satisfy it unless there is some reason to suppose that it will satisfy it. It is on the cards, therefore, that if the altera

tions made by the Lords were large enough to furnish a pretext for withdrawing the Bill the Government would take the opportunity of bringing forward a much shorter measure which would relieve the specific grievance created by the Act of 1902, and leave the larger questions raised by the present Bill for future consideration.

And why, it may be asked, should any one wish to discourage the Lords from taking this course? You admit, we may be told, that the Bill is faulty in many particulars. What better way, then, out of the difficulty can be suggested than such an amendment of it as would lead to its withdrawal? There are two conclusive reasons for rejecting this suggestion. This first is that we cannot be sure that the majority in the House of Commons would not see in it an opportunity for forcing on a conflict which would interest them very much more than one on education. There are many in that majority who would like nothing better than a fight with the Lords, partly because of an abstract dislike to an hereditary Legislature, or to a Chamber of Revision, and partly because they fear that the future action of the Lords may greatly delay those social changes which they have more at heart than any Education Bill. Whether they would be able to bring on such a conflict with no better justification than the mutilationas it would be called-of the present Bill is a matter which we shall not pretend to decide. It is enough for us that they might succeed in doing this, and that the mischief thus caused would be quite out of proportion to any educational advantage that might follow upon the withdrawal of the Bill. For we are convinced-and this is our second reason for preaching moderation to the Lords-that the materials for a final solution of the educational controversy are not in existence at this moment. All the proposals that have

been made in that direction stop short of what we believe to be the only logical way out of the difficulty, and the way that will ultimately be adopted. So long as a majority of the nation shrinks or is supposed to shrinkfrom an arrangement by which the State shall accept the responsibility for the secular teaching of the children in elementary schools, and leave to the The Economist.

churches the responsibility for the religious teaching, we shall never leave the wood of theological controversy behind us. We are sincerely anxious, therefore, that the Lords should do nothing to bring on a needless quarrel with the House of Commons-a quarrel in which we can see no promise of advantage either to the Constitution, or to religion, or to education.

THE SLEEP OF FLOWERS.

The stars as they revolve round the Pole indicate the time on the dial of the sky. And the flowers are earth's constellations:

Stars that in earth's firmament do shine.

Some of them, as the daisy, like certain stars of the sky, never set:

These pearled Arcturi of the earth
The constellated flowers that never set.

The

These earth stars, then, like those of the sky, may be used as clocks. child makes the seeded dandelion its floral timepiece, and tells the hour by the number of puffs required to blow off all the seeds. Such a clock, though fully satisfying the demands of childhood, was hardly scientific, so the great Swedish botanist, Linnæus, set about making a floral clock of greater accuracy. On this clock the hours were to be marked by the opening of various Linnæus's floral species of flowers. clock is an interesting conception, and its construction leads into important fields of botanical observation, but it cannot claim to keep astronomical time. The stars of earth are less regular than the stars of the sky.

Let us glance for a moment at the floral time-piece of the Swedish botanist. On its dial the hours were marked by the opening of certain flow

ers.

The times at which each blossom opened at Upsala were carefully observed by Linnæus, and those which showed the requisite amount of regularity in expanding were chosen to mark the hours., Here are a few of them. The earliest hour on the clock was three A.M., and this was marked by the opening of the flowers of a species of ipomoea. At four o'clock the goat's-beard struck the hour by opening its yellow blossoms, and it was followed by the Iceland poppy at five. The spotted cat's-ear awoke at six, and various species of sow-thistle and hawkweeds chimed the quarters between six and seven. Shepherd's Weather-glass marked the hour of eight by opening its bright eye to the Nine o'clock was marked by the unfolding of a marigold, and ten by a mesembryanthemum. At eleven the Star of Bethlehem, the Dame d'onze heures of the French, expanded its white blossoms. The evening hours were marked by the opening of the night-flowering catchfly at five, followed by the evening primrose at six. At seven the clock ends with the opening of Cereus grandiflorus. In our greenhouses, however, this plant does not open its large white flowers till ten o'clock. A plant of another species of cereus in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens used to begin to open between seven

sun.

and eight, and would be fully expanded by ten.

The daisy, or Day's Eye, the dæges eage of the Anglo-Saxons, is so-called because it opens with the rising sun and closes at its setting. Chaucer marks the habit in the well-known line:

The daisie, or else the eye of the daie.

And the Saxon name above noted shows that the Saxons also observed it. Herrick makes poetic use of the daisy's sleep in his Pastorall Sung to the King, where the Shepherd Mirtillo says of his beloved:

And when at night she folded had her sheep,

Daysies wo'd shut and closing, sigh and weep.

In another poem he intreats them not to close too soon:

Stay but till my Julia close Her life-begetting eye.

He points out to them also that the marigolds are still open:

No marigolds yet closed are.

Shakespeare, too, alludes to it, calling this flower:

The marigold that goes to bed with the sun,

And with him rises weeping.

The marsh marigold, the "winking Mary-bud" of Shakespeare, is another sleeper. And so, when "Phoebus 'gins arise," then "winking Mary-buds begin to ope their golden eyes." But if the daisy and marigold thus go to bed with the sun there are others which do not wait for the westening of the orb of day to begin their slumber. The goat's-beard closes its sleepy eye at midday, and is hence sometimes known as "Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon," or "Nap

at-noon." But if the goat's-beard is thus early to bed, it is also an early riser, opening its flowers about four o'clock. Cowley writes of it:

The goat's-beard, which each morn abroad does peep,

But shuts its flowers at noon, and goes to sleep.

So regular is the goat's-beard in closing that it has been called Flora's clock, and taken as a dinner-bell:

Till Flora's clock, the goat's-beard marks the hours,

And closing says "Arise, 'tis dinnertime."

This clock, however, is a little affected by the weather, and when it is very cloudy it postpones the dinnerhour. The dandelion-leaved hawk'sbeard is another "go-to-bed-at-noon," closing its eye about mid-day. You go out in the morning, and see its widely opened flowers alive with bees, and pastured on by numerous small beetles. You return in the afternoon while the sun is still hot, and lo, they are all closed, and the bees are gone! The blue flowers of the chicory do not awake from their nightly slumber until about eight, and by four in the afternoon they have gone to bed again. The daisy and the marigold rise and go to bed with the sun, but there are other flowers which depend even more directly on the orb of day. When the sun shines they open, and when his rays are hidden by a cloud they close. The crocus, for example, will open and close many times in the day as the sun shines out, or withdraws behind a cloud.

Other blossoms are sensitive to weather changes, and are hence known as meteoric flowers. When the weather is fine they open, but when a storm is approaching they take their sleep. Thus, when the barometer is falling and clouds are gathering for

rain, the scarlet pimpernel closes its bright little flowers. It has hence been called the Shepherd's Weatherglass. Other flowers, again, are on night duty, and must take their sleep during the day. The white flowers of the tobacco plant which were so beautiful and fragrant last night. are today closed and hanging down limp and flaccid. As the cool of evening comes on they will open, and raise themselves again, offering their fair white blooms to the night-flying moths. Towards evening, again, the evening primrose will unfold its pure yellow blooms. Before the middle of next day, however, they will be hanging limp and dead, never to open again. A little friendly artificial darkness will induce the evening primrose to anticipate its usual time of opening. Cover up a bud ready to expand, say with your hat, and it will wake up in the welcome gloom.

The Outlook.

The sleep and awaking of flowers seems to be influenced by light and darkness. They awake with the rising sun and sleep when he declines, or expand in the dark and shut up with the advent of day. Or again, they open and close as sunshine and cloud succeed each other. These movements, however, are to a certain extent independent of the sun. This was shown long ago by De Candolle, and has been recently confirmed by Mr. Francis Darwin. De Candolle kept certain flowering plants in darkness, and also in artificial light. He found that they opened and closed their flowers at about their usual times, although kept in continual light or darkness. cies of convolvulus, for example, still followed the clock in its hours of sleep and waking, though kept all the time in artificial light. The darkness did not prevent a flower from waking, nor did the light disturb its sleep.

A spe

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

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Arcady" will be greeted with special pleasure by readers who recall "A Bachelor in Arcady." The earlier characters reappear-Tom Lad and his redoubtable wife, Stylesey, the Wanderer, the Squire, Cathy, and the Bachelor himself under his new name-and upon a slender thread of narrative is spun a succession of leisurely essays on such topics as "Old Taverns," "A Wander Day," "Birthday Presents and a Village Blacksmith," "The Lavender Ladies," "Superstitions" and "An Autumn Comedy." An infusion of mild satire gives piquancy to the style, but the chief charm of the book is in its descriptions of English country life. E. P. Dutton & Co.

E. P. Dutton & Co. are the American publishers of two companion vol

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