286 BOARD OF EDUCATION 
Mr. Charles Trevelyan as Chairman, inquired into 
endowments in rural areas, the application of which 
presents ‘special difficulties.* It endeavoured to 
devise means of relieving the Board of work the 
results of which, under the existing law, were not 
proportionate to the time and labour expended, to 
provide a legislative remedy for the general failure 
of Educational Trusts resulting from the operation 
of the Education Acts, and to bring Local Education 
Authorities into closer connection with the endow- 
ments for elementary education. Educational en- 
dowments, generally speaking, were intended to 
provide advantages or facilities for particular areas 
or classes of persons which they would not otherwise 
enjoy. The continuous extension of the public 
system of education has provided those advantages 
and facilities out of public moneys, and the applica- 
tion of endowments to their original purposes has 
operated in an increasing degree for the benefit 
not of the beneficiaries but of the ratepayers—a 
result obnoxious to a fundamental rule of Charity 
Law. Much ingenuity has been exercised from 
time to time in finding new objects analogous to 
the old objects and supplementary to those ordinarily 
provided for out of public funds, but in each genera- 
tion many of the new and special objects have in 
their turn become customary objects of public 
provision, and the process of devising new objects 
has had to be renewed. The Committee’s list of 
thirteen special purposes to which endowments 
might be applied is still a useful one, but some items 
of it are already out of date for the reason above 
* Report of 1911, Cd. 5662