surprising. When Eben Fardd opened his school at Clynnog in 1827, the vicar agreed to pay him £3 per quarter for teaching 24 children to read, and an additional 5s. for making his accounts for the Vestry Meeting, while the parish contributed another 6s. It is not astonishing, therefore, to learn that in 1834, in addition to conducting his school, he was running a shop, binding books, and baking and selling bread. If attending school in those days was seldom either pleasant or profitable, conducting a school was neither the one nor the other.
Early in the nineteenth century two Societies were formed in England to promote the education of the poorer children. One of them was the British and Foreign School Society (1808) and the other the National Society (1811). Joseph Lancaster was the apostle of the one and Dr. Andrew Bell of the other, but whereas the National Schools were to teach the religious principles of the Church of England, religious teaching in the British Schools was to be entirely undenominational. Apart from this important distinction, there was very little difference between the two Societies at first. Both were voluntary societies in that they depended upon voluntary subscriptions and school fees for their funds; both were anxious to relieve misery and ignorance in the interests of law and order, for they felt, as most people then felt, that an ignorant population would be the more easily stirred to riots; and both adopted the Monitorial System. Bell claimed to have invented this system, though in point of fact it had already been extensively used on the Continent and in some of the Charity Schools in England. He had previously been Superintendent of a Home for orphan children in Madras. There he had first of all taught the older children, and had then set the brightest of them to teach the younger. This system was naturally very cheap; it cost about 7s. a year to educate a child, and it was an excellent way of turning out a good supply of teachers in a remarkably short time. "Give me 24 pupils today," said Bell on one occasion, "and I will give you 24 teachers tomorrow."
These two Societies opened schools far and wide throughout England and Wales. At first they received no grant from the state to meet their expenses but in 1833 the House of Commons, by a majority of only 50 to 26, voted £20,000 to be divided between them on a pound for pound basis for the erection of new schools. This grant was very small, both in relation to the enormous sum now being spent on education and even in relation to other state grants at that time; in 1839, for example, the Melbourne Government made a grant of £70,000 for the building of the King's mews at Windsor. This grant, small though it was, marked the beginning of government interest in education, and gradually it increased; in 1839 it was raised to £30,000, in 1846 it reached £100,000, and in 1946 the state spent the sum of nearly £90,000,000 on all forms of education other than the Universities, apart from the sums raised through the rates by the Local Education Authorities. Though the grants at first were made for the erection of schools, they were later extended to include the erection of school-houses and (later still) the purchase of school equipment.
