Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 371, 28 May 1880, Page 1

Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

It is frequently complained, and with a sufficient show of reason, that there is a disposition abroad in these colonies to bring handicraft of every kind into contempt. It is said parents are unwilling to have their children brought up as tradesmen, but are anxious to educate them for office work, and that, from this cause, there actually «re, and bid fair to increase in the future, a large clasl of men and youths, destined to pass their lives in, occasionally, the extreme want> and always the comparative dependence of a place-seeking life. It is impossible that such a system can be condemned in too strong language, and there are so many aspects in which it may be condemned, that the danger a writer who touches on it incurs is that of considering it at too great length. We are very much impressed, nevertheless, with the duty of combatting it, and for such a purpose, we translate the following passages relating to the dignity of labour, from the second conference given this year in Paris by the Dominican, Father Monsabre. They describe to us eloquently the view which the Catholic Church takes of the position cf the labourer :— •' How should the workman not love bis callinsr, if he understands all the honour he derives from the Divine humiliation, all the aid he may gain from it ? More favoured than the apostles, whose ministry Jesus only exercised for three years, he receives upon his humble and laborious life the direct reflection of thirty years of the Saviour's life. Whatever he may do, to whatever side he may turn, he meets with the remembrance and adored image of the .Divine labourer. He loves his children, the objects of cares so tender and such keen anxieties, and since he has no dwelling that is his own, often driven away by adverse seasons, he is obliged to carry from one place to another these poor little things, of whom the youngest may be still in its cradle. The necessity is cruel. But he remembers "that his God, the son of a workman, like his children, born in a stable and cradled in a manger, -was not permitted to rest for long in this wretched shelter, and that they were soon forced to carry Him away into exile, in order to withdraw Him from a jealous king's persecution. He is condemned to stiuggle for long hours together with some coarse substance that resists Jus hands ; but his God has done as much. He earns his bread, and that of his family with painful efforts ; but his God has earned it as he does. The wages of his work are disputed with him ; but they were disputed with his God. He lives from day to day, abandoned to Providence ; but such was the life of his God. In presence of the laws human and divine which weigh upon his laborious life, of the accidents and circumstances which limit and hinder the exercise of his strength, of the patrons who command him, of the rich whose unreasonableness torments him, of the callings whose superiority is honoured by the world, he feels kimself in a state of continual dependance ; but it was the will of his God, the Sovereign Master of the Universe, to submit himself to His creatures. Erat svbditiis illis. His God always ! His God everywhere 1 Ah ! if nature, sometimes too much oppressed, murmurs and grumbles, he can say to it : 'Be silent, lam not more than a God. Let me hasten like Him to seek comfort in the bosom of my Heavenly Father, and lean tranquilly on His all-powerful arm ; for if Jesus deigned to ennoble the workman, by making of Himself a workman He will know how, when it is necessary, to come to the help of the glorified companions of His toil.' Unfortunately we no longer hear such language as this from the labourer. The Christian spirit has vanished in the revolutionary trouble that overwhelmed the religious corporations, in which the remembrance of Nazareth over-shadowed the humblest trades, in which the labourer, fortified by esprit de cmys, protected by laws that regulated his wages and his labour, respected by society, learned to respect himself, and to be content with his likeness to a God. Since then the labourer, without £ aditions and without support, has become the prey of pitiless rapacity that makes its own use of his strength, of the envy which gnaws him, ana of ambitions men who excite his anger, and urge him on to

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUB.

murderous attempts by representing to him in the blackest colours his oppressed life, and by enticing his covetousness with lying promises. Formerly he might be unfortunate yet honourable ; he has become wretched so that, in the midst of Christian civilisation, he recalls the abjection of pagan centuries. You have been moved by his misfortunes, gentlemen, and have thought that it was time to apply Christian principles to the solution of this formidable question concerning labour which has imposed itself upon our anxious and troubled epoch. I congratulate you on your resolution, and I pray God to bless your efforts. This is not the place to trace a programme for you, permit me only to advise you. If it be your design to ward off a social danger, by occupying yourselves with transforming the ideas* exalting the sentiments, and ameliorating the condition of the workman, it is well. If you yield to that generous compassion which inclines Christian hearts towards those who suffer, it is better. But you will only reach perfection when you mingle with your anxiety for the public good and your charity, the religious respect that Jesus the workman asks for those whose life he ennobled and sanctified during the fruitful yean of his sojourn in Nazareth. Of all civilising acts that is the most efficacious. The best intentions, the greatest benefits, can be spoiled by a lofty protection. On the other hand, the workman will return so much the better and mere quickly to a sense of his dignity, as he shall see it more sincerely respected by those who are recalling it to him. It was thus that, in those times they call barbarous, the Church accomplished the education of the labourer. High and powerful lords, of their own accord, come down from the summit of greatness, donned the monk's frock, and condemned themselves to labour with their hands in order to honour the laborious and hidden life of the God of Nazareth. One of them, Count Ermanfroy, never met a rustic or a handicraftsman without feeling himself deeply touched as if by a Divine apparition. He went and took his hands respectfully, kissed them and watered them with his tears. Gentlemen, lam of the spiritual race of Ermanfroy, Like him a monk and a friend of the labourer, I should not think that I humiliated myself by imitating him, for my faith shows me in all those hands that labour has bruised the adorable hands of Jesus the workman. 1 ' It is thus that this great French preacher interprets to us the mind of the Church towards the labourer. That most august of all institutions on earth ; the acknowledged mistress of emperors and kings and nobles, sees in the workman only the earthly representative of her God. But what shall be said of those people who despise labour and who, rather than bring up their children to an honest trade, prefer to train them to dependence, at least, and very possibly to absolute want, in pursuit of a contemptible and spurious gentility.

WENDKLL PHILLIPS <YW TPUVT.A'WTk

One of the ablest, if not the ablest of all, addresses made in connection with the cause of Ireland now at last brought before the world, otherwise than as coloured by the false representations of England, ia that which was delivered in Boston on Maich 21st by Wendell Phillips. It was on the I^ish question the famous orator addressed his audience, amounting to some four thousand in number. The Irish question, he said, considered by itself, " Let me say at the outset we should all understand it is the Irish question ; it is not necessarily a Catholic question, largely as Catholicism prevails in Ireland ; and although the van of her movement has always been held by a Catholic, it is still to be remembered that this question today, as it has been uttered for 100 years, is emphatically the Irish question, not the Catholic questiop." This was a very necessary explanation, for it must be admitted that if at length Ireland is to have justice done to her, if for the most part, the other nations of the world are to perform their duty, as they seem inclined to do, and shame England into justice, if this be possible, their sympathies can be enlisted only for a Catholic people apart from its Catholicism • In the face of what we witness elsewhere at the present day» any other expectation would be insane. Still all honour to those noble Protestants who did not seek to separate the Irish question from its Catholic bearing, but lent their aid to their suffering country all Catholic as they recognised her to be, and were willing that she should continue. "And let it be remembered also," said the speaker, " that some of the greatest names connected with this history of a century, men eminent in genius and sincere and

self-sacrificing in purpose, have not been Catholics, but Protestants. It would be a shame to Ireland to say that only one sect championed her cause, that the rest'of the Irish race was recreant and unfeeling amid these infamous excesses of a neighbour island. Dean Swift, whom Addison pronounced the brightest genius of his day, Curran, Emmet, and Grattan, and, above all, Burke, perhaps, the brightestname in English civil history for 100 years, almost Plato in the academy and more than Cicero in the senate, and grouped around these in more modern times comes Smith O'Brien, and the martyred Davis, the men who went to the dungeon and the halter in behalf of Ireland — were Protestants." All honour, too, to the man who tries to separate the Irish question from the Catholic question, and, although he is no Catholic, finds that the nobility of his heart will not allow of his doing so. He continues :—": — " So I would present this question to you as an Irish question, not necessarily as a Catholic question ; and yet let me say on that, though I am no Catholic, no man that respects human nature can but bow with admiring and grateful adoration at the spectacle of a small handful, a few millions of men, standing for their faith, hunted, exiled, trodden under foot, starved to death, sent to the gallows, and yet for three hundred years loyal to the faith thus persecuted. I sometimes compare the five millions of Irishmen to the half-dozen millions of the Poles— Poland,the knighterrant of the Middle Ages, the grandest exhibition of chivalry when chivalry was the grandest exhibition of humanity ; and it was with her arms that John Sobieski stopped the blows of the Mussulman, and saved Europe and the Rhine to the Cross." Yet the name of Poland, the Saviour of Europe, he complains has been blotted out of the map of Europe ; blotted out, let us add, amidst the indifference of Europe that for the most part had no longer any affection for a faithfully Catholic people. Ireland, he says, had, three hundred years before, been subjected to a like trial by fire and sword, but after three hundred years of persecution, she is found still a living nation, " And yet after three hundred years, with the cross of her faith in one hand and the banner of her nationality in the other, Ireland dictates terms to the British empire, and is the governing political element in the civil affairs of Great Britain." The Irish question has long been the great question in the affairs of Great Britain ; it has been the rock ahead that has puzzled statesmen and confounded parties. It might be imagined that Ireland had some peculiar crime to answer for, but her only crime is the short distance that separates her from the shores of England. « If she were three thousand miles off on the banks of the St. Lawrence, there would be many an English statesmen that would advocate the surrender of the colonies. If she was on the other side of the globe, on the banks of the Ganges, there is a vast preponderance of English statesmen who would say, surrender India instead of pouring out blood and treasures like water to save the useless dependents." Every great statesman, from Chatham downward, has done his utmost to root out the bitterness between the two countries. That is, we suppose, has done his utmost to make Ireland content to be treated with injustice, to be coerced, and starved in the furtherance of British interests ; in such a light, at least, do we read the efforts made by English statesmen to soothe her bitterness. The gravity of the situation ' was apparent to these statesmen. " They saw its peril, they acknowledged the gravity of the danger ; they saw sixty per cent., two-thirds of the rank and file of the army recruited from Ireland, and they trembled when they knew that amid that vast proportion of the British ranks the men who filled them not only hated but had sound cause to hate ..Great Britain." O'Connell, it was, who discovered the force of public opinion, and appealed to it, and Parnell now is following in his steps. O'Connell is in his grave. •' Nigh thirty years have passed away since God took him to his reward, and yet his great successor on the banks of the Mississippi draws into his right hand the helm of the sympathy of 50,000,000 of people, and Parnell goes home to Europe fourfold stronger thau he left her shores." Parnell stands on the floor of the House of Commons, supported by the hearts of 10,000,000 American Irishmen ; but the victory is due to O'Connell. He may say of that grand wave that will yet awe England into submisiou "This victory is mine, for I taught you the method and I gave yoii the tools." Parnell has come to America to ask relief for his country uffering from a famine which is not the fruits of the will of Divine Providence. « This is no; blight of the harvest. This is no operation of great natural causes which, as in India Persia, sent millions of men -nto want, a his is a famine enacted by statute. This is a famine manufactured by law. This is an artificial famine.' This is a famine born and bred [of the English aristocracy. This is a famine begotten of English hate and English prejudice. What do 1 meap ?.1 mean this— that neither now noi in 1847, when we stretched out such generous hands to Ireland, there was no want among the millions of men who filled or fill that Ireland. From the harbours of Ireland will go out 18,000,000 of pounds of meat to English markets this very year, and 180,000,000 of pounds of Irish butter will seek the British market, and not one family i n fif ty tnat make it ever taste the article they make. A million pounds' worth— 5,000,000 dollars' worth— of fish, caught by Scotch cunning in Irish waters, are eaten in England. Five million dollars' worth of

other fish from the waters of Ireland go to that very market." And all this immense production of Irish industry goes to pay rent. The liish people work and starve, while the luxurious mob that suck their blood riot in the enjoyments of foreign capitals. Yet their country is one of the most fertile in the world. Parnell says : " I have seen the blue-grass region of Kentucky, I have looked upon the pride of the western prairies, and I have yet to find a spot as fertile in its length and depth as the land from which I came." There are people who believe the ills of Ireland to be exaggerated, or who say they must be the fault of the Irish people. " Ireland cannot be as miserable as she is painted. It must be that the inhabitants are idle ; it must be that Catholicism takes out the nerve and gist of the industry." But the .French peasant is Catholic, and yet the most prosperous and industrious in the world. He owns his land, but all the farms of the Irish farmer are owned by a mere handful of aliens. That is the explanation of the famine. And then there is the policy of England. "If England ruled us to-day, new England would be another Ireland ; and if she had grown as populous— if you can suppose her to have grown as populous as she is to-day — she would have had a population from 12,000,000 to 15,000,000, for the English policy shut us down to one employment. She said : • You shall not interfere with me in manufacturing ; you shall not cross my path ; you shall not neutralise my enterprises ; and you shall not injure my profits. The colonies shall be a treasure-house flowing into Great Britain. We won't consider any one single instance of prosperity or the property of the colony itself.' " Such is the way in which Ireland is treated, and the results are plain in the emigration of her people^ " Men that are contented and happy and prosperous stay at home* Strongest and deepest in a man's nature is attachment to home. He will clutch and reach away from home only under the most intense pressure of poverty and tyranny. There is no emigration from France, You can hardly count it. You seldom meet a Frenchman abroad on the restive surface of the earth, and if you do his face is always tending towards Paris. The first thing he says to you is, *I am going home.' He would not die out of Paris. ' Bury me on the banks of the Seine, amid the people I love/ said the great Napoleon, and every Frenchman echoes the sentiment, because France, with her 90,000,000 acres has 5.600,000 owners— s,soo,ooo proprietors. If you want to make the prosperity of Ireland, make her over in the portraiture of France — give every Irishman a farm." Had Ireland been prosperous her population should now be over 11,000,000. She has but 5,000,000 and where are the rest ? " They came over here, and it may be said with truth it is their strong arm that will yet break the yoke off their native land." The force, however, they are to use is the force of moral sentiment and intellecual opinion, the strongest force on earth. Still the speaker is not to judge for all the world, he explains himself as follows :—": — " For me, in a land of newspapers, with ten millions of sheets printed every day and scattered to fifty millions of people, forty millions of whom can read — for me, an appeal to common sense and justice is the strongest and most lasting that can be made ; but still I am not the narrow judge that, looking over to Moscow, dares to say that the dagger in one hand and the torch in the other is not the best form of agitation. What I meant when I said that the strong arm of the Irish race on this side of the water will yet be the cause of freeing their native land was this : God gave, us this continent to subdue. We have to dot it with cities, and cobweb it with roads. We were to marry the ocean with iron routes. We had very few hundreds to do it with. It was a vast task, and God taught us to make our brains double our hands. We set at work to invent, and the genuine Yankee baby six months old looks over the side of his cradle and plans a new model and gets out a patent. That is the Yankee race — disdaining to drudge, skulking the primal curse, and getting their living without the sweat of their brow ; but there was needed beside that the stalwart hand and the ready and patient industry to build the roads that link the continent 'to the seaboard, and they were furnished largely by the German and Irish people. Many of them have gone down unhonoured to their graves ; but their work remains, and to-day, by virtue of that work, the prairies of Illinois, and the still vaster wheat region of Dakota and Montana, are brought by rail and steamer alongside of every harbour to Liverpool, and the farmer of Yorkshire and Lancashire is put close at hand with the competition of innumerable acres of the great West. A man holds his acres at £20 and £50 and £70 a-piece, and lets them until his rental is £20.000. He competes with the acre? of Montana, with the cheese of Canada, and the meat of Ohio, where an acre is worth on an. average five dollars, and anyone can see the competition is worse than the Turkish Moslem's. It is the handwriting on the wall that says to the landed class of Great Britain, ' You have been measured and weighed, and your doom is sealed.' At times there comes a great epoch in civilisation which upsets a nation and takes down a class. That is no man's fault. It is the result of great forces which none can calculate and none resist, and it is so at this moment, when this great wave is beating against the bulwarks of the British State, for it is fouuded on property, and has not yet travelled up to the level of resting its institutions upon man. We are the only nation — until France two or three years ago— that ever dared to rest its State

on man. The great courage that our fathers showed was neither at Bunker Hill nor at Yorktown. That was the courage of blood, but the courage of brain was when Jefferson and Sam Adams looked out on the State about to be, launched with a sublime faith in God that it was safe to leave a man with all the rights God gave him, rested the State on man, not educated man, nor wealthy man, nor well-born man, but man. Europe laughed at us. English statesmen gave us Rorty years for a shipwreck ; but 100 years rolled away, and in 1876 we said to the world : ' Come and measure the grandeur of what we have done. Come and look. We have opened a new chapter in the possibilities of the race, and we still float on that great sea of trust in man.' Now, England has not reached us. She rests on property, and the great Gibraltar of landed property quivers in the convulsive current of the scientific civilisation of the nineteenth century. Her institutions are like great vessels crashing and jostling together in storms. Science and industry and uncounted acres assail the State* and no man can cilculate the result. The animal man, the basis of the intellect, the inspiration of the heart, has a right to a living against all parchments and registries of deeds. That is the law of God ; but a blind and cruel and obstinate aristocracy takes the bit between its teeth, and, running riot, says : ' I care neither for the law of God, nor for the stomachs of the people, and I hold my land with an iron grip.' •If you won't be ruled by the rudder,' says an old proverb, 'you shall be ruined by the rock.' If a power does not wake in time and let a statesmanlike helm guide its course, then the vessel of State goes to pieces. That is the course of events ; for the community, when pent up, crippled, battened down under the hatches, takes its revenge by rising like the blind giant of the Jews, and bringing down State and temple in one promiscuous ruin."

A MEETING 01 EXTREMES.

The ancien rigime, then, it would appear, was not the altogether dark and tyrannous rule that we have been led to believe it to have been. It had its excellent points, and our boasted nineteenth century returns to it for aid in carrying out the progress of the day. It is to the ancien regime the Government of the French Republic looks in its present need : the Ferry education bill has been modified by all the statesmen of moderation in France, whatever may otherwisa be their opinions, and, in consequence, the Ministry are obliged to seek back to that anti-revolutionary system which has been so vilified, and, as we understand it, not altogether vilified unjustly, for, authority to work the persecution it is determined upon. Evidently the ancien regime has been misunderstood and calumniated, it was not in truth the blind instrument of Borne that it has been asserted to have been, whenever Home's opponents have wanted something wherewith to blacken her reputation. It knew how to hold Borne very wholesomely in check, and it was in fact, a very much more enlightened system than of late years it has obtained credit for. Even the London Times, then, acknowledges that the question in France is not that of education chiefly or perhaps at all. He says : " There is no longer much hypocrisy about the nature of the contest. It is admitted to be not a fight for a new system of education, but an episode in the war against clericalism." And again we say, for it is worth insisting upon, it is to the ancien, rigime that the Republic looks for the weapons of its warfare. — Its warfare begins as usual by an attack upon the religious Orders, with the Jesuits in their van. But let us see how matters stood under that ancien r6gvnie, when it has been convenient for some people to suppose the Pope was virtually ruler of France, when Rome is assumed to have been accountable for every disorder, and every act of oppression or cruelty that took place there. " Not only in 1749," says M. Tame, " had it (the Government) prohibited the Church from receiving land either by donation, by testament, or in exchange, without royal letters-patent registered in Parliament ; 'not only in 1764 had it abolished the Order of Jesuits, closed their colleges and sold their possessions, but also since 1766, a permanent commission, formed by the king's order and instructed by him, had lopped off all the dying and dead branches of the ecclesiastical tree. There was a revision of the primitive constitutions, a prohibition to every institution to have more than two monasteries at Paris, and more than one in other towns ; a postponement of the age for taking vows — that of sixteen being no longer permitted — up to twenty-one for men, and eighteen for women ; an obligatory minimum of monks and nuns for each establishment, which varies from fifteen to nine according to circumstances ; if this is not kept up there follows a suppression or prohibition to receive novices. Owing to these measures rigorously executed, at the end of twelve years, the Grammontins, the Servites, the Celestins, the ancient Order of St. Benedict, that of the Holy Ghost of Montpellier, and those of Sainte-Brigitte, Sainte-Croix-de-la-Brettonerie, Saint-Ruff, and SaintAntoine, — in short nine complete congregations had disappeared. At the end of twenty years three hundred and eighty-six establishments had been suppressed, the number of monks aud nuns had diminished one third, the larger portion of possessions which had escheated were usefully applied, and the congregations of men lacked novices and complained that they could not fill up their ranks."

(" The Revolution," Durand's Trans.) Such was the work, then, of the ancien regime, and what it had left undone the Revolution ac complished. " The Revolution," says the Times, " swept away religious orders in which monastic vows were taken, and it soon put the finishing touch to the work of destruction by abolishing all religious orders indiscriminately." Of the nature of those orders M. Tame again informs us : he tells us that one Convent of Bernardins had fed as many as twelve hundred poor for six weeks together, and that " The monastery of Trois-Rois, in the north of Franche-Comte, founded four villages collected from foreign colonists. It is the only centre of charity and civilisation in a realm of three leagues. It took care of two hundred of the sick in a recent epidemic ; it lodges the troops which pass from Alsace into Franche-Comte, and in the late hail-storm it supplied the whole neighbourhood with food." He speaks of the literary labours of the Benedictines ; of the Trappists " who cultivate the ground with their own hands," and of " innumerable monasteries which serve as educational seminaries, bureaus of charity, hospices for shelter, and of which all the villages in the neighbourhood demand the conservation by the National Assembly. 1 He goes on to speak of the thirty-seven thousand nuns in fifteen hundred convents, many of whose communities have no means of subsistance besides the work of their own hands and such small dowries as their members may have brought with them on their entrance. "So great, however," he says, "is their frugality and economy, that the total expenditure of each nun. does not surpass two hundred and fifty livres (about £10) a year. The Annonciades of Saint- Amour say, ' We thirty -three nuns, both choristers and those of the white veil, live on four thousand four hundred livres net income. without being a charge to our families or to the public If we were living in society, our expenses would be three times as much.' And not content with providing for themselves, they give in charity. Among these communities, several hundreds are educational establishments ; a very great number give gratuitous primary instruction. . . . Fourteen thousand Sisters of Charity, distributed among four hundred and twenty convents, look after the hospitals, attend upon the sick, serve the infirm, bring up foundlings, provide for orphans, lying-in women, and repentant prostitutes. The " Visitation " is an asylum for ' those who are not favoured by nature ;' and in those days, there were many more of the disfigured than at present, since out of every eight deaths one was caused by small-pox. Widows were received here, as well as girls without means and without protection, parsons ' worn out with the agitations of the world,' those who are too feeble to support the battle of life, those who withdraw irom it wounded and invalided, and ' the rules of the Order, not very strict, are not beyond the health and strength, of the most frail and delicate.' Some ingenious device of charity thus applies to each moral and social sore, with skill and care, the proper and proportionate dressing." Such were the religious Orders in France before the revolution, and to-day their number is increased and their good works still more abundant. The Times attributes their restoration to the labours of Fathers Lacordaire and Ravignan; he says : — " Lacordaire and an almost equally great orator, Pere Ravignan, the one a Dominican, the other a Jesuit, helped not a little to plant again the shoots of religious orders in their country. Persuaded that his Church had lost half its strength since the decay of these great ecclesiastical bodies, the former claimed freedom for them in the name of the Charter and of the principles of modern Liberals, and set himself for many years of his life to carrying out this object. He overcame much resistance. The appearance of Lacordaire in his white frock as a Dominican in the pulpit of Notre Dame was the beginning of a new era. It was a shock of surprise to the Archbishop, of Paris of that time no less than to the^enemies of the religious orders But the public got over their first astonishment, and soon ceased to marvel when they heard that a new Benedictine abbey or Jesuit seminary had been opened. The movement grew without much check." M. Tame, however, more truly explains the reason of the restoration. " Evidently," says he, "in the presence of such institutions one must pause, however little one may ba for justice and the public interest ; and, moreover, because it is useless to act rigorously against them. The legislator crushes them in vain, for they spring up again of their own accord ; they are in the blood of every Catholic nation." Meantime the decree against the Jesuits has been issued ; their establishments are to be broken up, the month of August being assigned as the limit of their existence. The expulsion of the Fathers from France in the last century paved the way for the revolution, and we doubt not but that it now will prove the signal for the mask of moderation wholly to fall from the face of the Republic, and for the speedy arrival once more of anarchy and terror.

" EUEEKA."

Here is a nut to be cracked by our good friends who at every remark that is made concerning education, cry out to us :: — <* Oh, hold your tongue, there are no schools in Spain. Don't think of aspiring to Catholic education until you have taught alMhe little Spaniards their three R's ; the sapie as you would if you were good Protestants or Secularists."

But, lo and behold ! there are, in proportion, at this moment more little Spaniards at school in their native land, than there are English children at school in England. Here are the figures as the London Times quotes them from the educational organs of Germany, " England with 34,000,000 inhabitants, has 68,000 schools, attended by 3,000,000

scholars. . . . Spain with 17,000,000 of people, has 20,000 schools, 1,600,000 scholars." At this rate, then, if the population of Spain were equal to that of England, she would have 200,000 more of her children at school than England has. And let us add, that

education in England is compulsory, whereas it is voluntary in Spain, This quite explodes the popular non-Catholic notion concerning the action of the Church amongst the Spaniards.