SCHOOL COMMITTEE ELECTIONS.

Hastings Standard, Issue 3, 29 April 1896, Page 3

SCHOOL COMMITTEE ELECTIONS.

SUCCESS OF THE BIBLE-IN-SCHOOLS PARTY.

COMMENTS BY "THE POST."

[Special to Standard.]

Wellington, This Day.

At the School Committee elections in the City, the party favouring religious instruction in schools scored heavily. The Evening Post, of yesterday, dealing with the subject, says The success of the clerical party at the School Committee elections of last evening conclusively proves how well grounded have been our fears that danger was impending to the integrity of the national secular system of education of this country. Patient organisation and unsleeping vigilance on the part of the cleric, combined witbj a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Government at the dictation, we must .suppose, of the Premier, have triumphed over the inertia and indifference" of the Nationalists, who will, perhaps, to-day be awakened from the fools' paradise in which they have slept to some realisation of the danger that is threatened to the greatest bulwark of the Democracy, and unless the Democrats of this colony are content to see that bulwark undermined and eventually overturned by invading Ecclesiasticism, they must imitate organisation and make ready to light what may prove to be a long drawn out battle for the preservation of the secular, compulsory, and free State school. It will of course be denied that this is threatened, but the story of clerical intolerance upon this question is too deeply graven on all the pages of history to admit of doubt to any outside the influence of the clergy but those who are optimistic or uninformed.