Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 40, 23 January 1885, Page 1

Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

The London Times has published a long series of extracts from the Irish newspapers, and from the speeches of Irish Members of Parliament and other Nationalist* — publishing also a leader in which the extracts in question are brought forward as a proof of the necessity that exists for the continuance of coercion in Ireland, and the support of the firm and gentle Spencer. The extracts published are, indeed, of a nature that could hardly be overlooked, and since the tyranny they dared was afraid to meet them on its own ground, and make an example of their authors, the Times evidently thought that something at least must be done to bring good out of so much and such dangerous evil. One of the extracts in question we quoted last week, and there are numerous others not one whit less outspoken. They deal with all the famous, or rather infamous, cases that have occurred of late, and of which, it would seem, we have by no means heard the last, and they make no pretence whatever to conceal or in any way veil the accusations they bring. Jf, fo r example, the fellows concerned in the Dublin scandals— that is those of them who escaped the punishment due to abominable crimedesired to clear their characters more fally than they coald be cleared by the decision of a packed jury— declaring that the evidence produced for the prosecution was insufficient to admit of their conviction, and thereby implying that the evidence produced for the defence was totally worthless— there were abundant grounds for an action given them over and over again. There were abundant grounds, moreover, for a criminal prosecution on the part of Lord Spencer and several of his officials who— as we saw last week in the Maamtrasna case — were openly, and even violently, accused of being implicated in the execution or imprisonment of innocent men, and of shielding offenders whom they knew to be brutally guilty. Since these publications were made, moreover, and since the article to which we allude was published by the Times a member of the Irish party asked Mr. Campbell-Bannerman in Parliament whether his Government had taken notice of the articles in question, and as to whether it was their intention to take any steps in connection with them. Mr. Bannerman's answer was that Government had seen the articles, but considered that it would be attributing too much importance to them ware any proceedings instituted against their authors, thereby overthrowing the argument of the Times to the effect that the publication of such articles was a strong reason for the continuance of coercion, «*nd his appeal to the testimony of Carey as to the effects they were likely to produce upon the Irish people. Such an answer, however, was a palpable absurdity, and covered with ridicule much that had already taken place under coercion in Ireland, since journalists had been punished there for utterances of far less openness, and likely to produce much weaker results. To take no notice of these articles, in fact, was simply to confess that what had been done before had been unwisely done and had proved of no useful effect— an admission that must in some degree cast a reflection on the wisdom of coercion generally. But the chief object of the newspapers that published the articles alluded to was to bring about the criminal prosecution, which the Times affirms would have taken place in any community except that over which Lord Spencer presides with so much " moderation and patience." The men who wrote and published these articles knew that in such a way the inquiry into the cases they have exposed, and the consequent revelation of the iniquities of the Castle s>stem i which is what they have most at heart, must be made, and they had taken care to be provided with the most certain and undeniable proofs of their statements before they published them. No one knew better than they how much mercy they had to expect from the "moderation and patience" of the Lord Lieutenant. They had had ample experience of what such qualities meant in relation to him, and without the full certainty of victory they would never have dared the fight — the more particularly as, without the means o^ making good tbeir assertions, they would have injured not only themselves but their cause. We, however, agree with the Times that the publications in question call for the continuance of coercion. They do more than that, in fact. They call for its being increased and

AT TH» KB WITS' BNU.

made wbolly despotic. They require that the Lord Lieutenant, in order that he may carry on the government of Ireland in accordance with the old tyranny, should have the power of silencing every one who dares to question any of his proceedings without the slightest danger of being called to account or of risking the revelations that must be made public were he to proceed against any one of tb« writers whose articles have been published by the Time*. Whetheir the English public will accord to Lord Spencer the moral support the Times claims for him, under the circumstances it still remains for us to see. But probably they will do all that is demanded of them.

IS IT TRUE ?

T&9 report 4J»*t has reached us by telegram to the ffffiWl'tifiitfigr. Campbell-Bannerman had professed himself in favour of something very like Home Bale for Ireland is one which we are hardly inclined to receive without some farther assurance. It is, of coarse, qoite possible that a man who had gone over to Ireland ignorant of the real state of things there, and prepared to walk in the steps in which his predecessors bad trodden, on becoming better informed and seeing with his own eyes should change his mind, and enter upon a very different path from that proposed for him. A genuinely honest man, we should say, would of necessity do this, and we shall be glad to find that Mr. Bannerman has proved himself to be possessed of such a character. Meantime his entrance upon the duties of his new office was marked in a very sinister manner, for one of the first official acts he bad to perform was the reinstatement of the notorious George Bolton as Crown Prosecutor, an act which, were it to afford a presage of the course lo be pursued by him, must entirely shut out any hope of a just or honourable career on his part. The reinstatement of Bolton was brought before Parliament by Mr. Healy, when he spoke in support of Mr. Sexton's amendment to the Address, and the facts that could not be contradicted, and which no attempt was made to contradict, were such as could not fail to make every respectable man in the House feel heartily ashamed. This man who had been declared by an English judge to have swindled, in the most heartless manner, his own wife ; who bad been a by no means clean-handed bankrupt, and had been proved to have kept back an important deposition in the Maamtrasna case, was now restored to his task of administering an Act — the Coercion Act — whose very rigour demanded the nicest handling for it. Bolton, moreover, had been reinstated because of the revelations which he threatened to make — and we may add that in this we obtain a striking proof of the infamous manner in which the law had been administered, as well as an earnest of the way in which its provisions will continue to be enforced. Mr. Healy, however, had something still worse to bring before the House than the case of George Bolton. At the time he spoke the Government were still in hopes that a third packed-jury might prove more complaisant in dealing with the vile James Ellis French than the two which had preceded it, and which, contrary to all expectations as well as all precedents, had only succeeded in disagreeing. And it is certainly an omen of a very grave significance for the Castle when the packed-jury begins to fail it, one of its most potent engines thus proving out of gear. But Mr. Healy looked forward to the acquittal of French and bis reward, in common with his more fortunate comrade Cornwall, as well as the equally disgraced Castle- fugitive Corry Connellan, by a pension. The fact of French's conviction and sentence to penal servitude, meantime, strengthens all that the speaker produced concerning the past, and makes the contemplation of the deeds that have been done in Ireland appalling in the extreme. In the hands of this wretch were the lives of innocent men and women. On evidence worked up by him, men were convicted and executed, as, for example, in the case of Poff and Barrett, in which the only witness had been an old woman of bad character who had contradicted herself in a marked manner but concerning which the infamous official had boasted that owing to his experience of heavy cases he had been allowed by certain persons to have worked it up " closer to the wind " than any other case they had ever seen. And on the strength of this working up two men declarljg themselves innocent, and firmly believed to be so, no more by their own friends than by the majority of the Irish people, were banged. — Mr. Healy also spoke of French's proposal to a man in Cork, upon whom he thought he could depend, to get up a tumultuous attack as if by Nationalists on Judge Barry n which he jocularly added it would not matter if tho Judge were

lulled,— in order that he might gain distinction by bringing the criminals to justice. — In connection with this revelation, moreover, it might be interesting to inquire into the origin of many of the outrages that occurred in Ireland, and as to how far such an origin might be included in the revelations that French declared himself ready to make in case Government did not buy his silence at a high price. — It has never transpired, for instance, who the " Number One " was under whose directions James Carey described himself as acting. Mr. Healy, however, pointed out how the moderate^and patient, the firm and gentle, Spencer, the high and noble Earl who is the object of all England's warmest admiration, and his chief secretary of like merit, had been brought into close contact with these fellows of whom he spoke, and had acknowledged them as their most faithful and attached servants and fellow-workers in the cause of law and order. — The only interruption, meantime, that was made occurred on the part of Mr. Trevelyan, who indignantly rejected Mr. Healy 's assertion that he, Mr, Trevelyan, had considered it a monstrous charge to be accused of being seen with or of speaking to French— and defending that high official from the accusation of having packed juries, an accusation that Mr. Healy was able to make good from French's own letter.— ln fact a more scathing indictment of men in authority was never made than that which Mr. Healy brought against the members of the Irish Government, and there was no one who dared to raise his voice in their defence. — Whether Mr. Campbell Bannerman, found in this speech matter that seemed to him a fit subject for inquiry, and whether having made such an inquiry and found that Mr. Healy had not exaggerated— that in fact many things in connection with the Castle system were perhaps even unsuspected by Mr. Healy, we cannot say, but it is possible that it may have been so, or that something else may have opened the Chief Secretary's eyes to the true state of the case.— At all events, let us hope that the report which has reached us may prove true, and that a man has at length been found capable of preserving his honesty in a situation that has ever proved the fruitful source of corruption to him who filled it.— ln sach a case if the Chief Secretary's firmness be equal to his honesty, and Mr. Campbell-Bannerman's firmness has been loudly boasted of, beneficial results may certainly be looked for.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER.

3t. Augusts Couvbeub, late deputy-chairman of the Belgian House of Commons ha 3, it seems, been in Edinburgh, engaged in claiming the sympathy of philosophic Scotchmen for the struggle that the party to which he belongs are carrying en against Christianity in his country. M. Couvreur was sure of a sympathetic audience, and, as among ourselves, it was sufficient that under any pretext he came forward as the enemy of the Catholic Church to secure for him all that he desired. Our contemporary the Evening Star, which in thi3 respect may be taken to represent either the philosophic Scotch party or the continental party that wages the fight in the cause of atheism, or perhaps an agreeable mixture of both with another enlightened element or two thrown in, has published M. Couvreur's address in eatenso, having found therein much refreshment of spirit and powerful arguments in favour of the godlessness that it is his chief privilege to support and advocate. Arguments, however, in favour of godlessness, as opposed to the Catholic Church, in New Zealand, need be of no very great strength. The cause of Lucifer is in the ascendant, and any light prop will suffice to give it the support it needs. M. Couvreur, nevertheless, cannot be accused of weakness ; the prejudices and complete ignorance of his subject among bis audience afforded him the most favourable circumstances possible, and he certainly made the best of them. Facts were as plenty as blackberries at his command, and where they failed fiction presented itself with the utmost accommodation. Whenever M. Couvreur, in short, mentioned the Church, her doctrines, her discipline, or her teaching, or her practices, he dealt with fiction, and that in a very unblushing manner. But as to his facts, some of them, at least, were manufactured for an especial purpose, and having been bo manufactured in Belgium, it was an easy thing for the speaker to pack them up in his skull and carry them across to Scotland. As to his history of the excellent state of educational matters that had existed in Belgium under the Protestant regime, it is. a pity that it should reflect co much on Protestant England, where, according to the interesting statement lately made in Dnnedin by Mr. George Bell— a sure authority on such questions— there had been no thought whatever given to popular education until much later in the century, and where the primary teachers that M. Couvreur speaks of as condemned by the Governor of Luxembourg in 1834, as tradesmen of various kinds, were matched, again according to the authority of Mr. George Bell, by the typical teacher whose classes were held among the hen-roosts and dog kennels, and the worthy dame who refused to count her pupils lest the fate of David in numbering the Israelites might overtake her. And in England there had been no interloping Church of Borne to introduce such a condition of things. If, then, such a state of things could exist in the country that has long boasted, fteelf the first of Protestant Powers, how was-it needful for the

Church alone to introduceitelsewhere? M. Couvreur, however, had not a very critical audience and such distortions of history as it might suit him to make were received without a cavil. But when he impudently asserts that the ideal oE the Church is that there " should be no education," then we say that he is guilty of gross and palpable falsehood. An easy audience, too, was there to listen to M. Coavreur's appeal to the answering of the men who had joined the army in 1382 and 1883, as disgracing the educational system of 1842.— The examination made of these pupils was made by enemies of that system and for the purpose of condemning it. It was absolutely necessary to afford them any pretence for their tyrannical measures that such a step should be taken. And verily they were men who had proved themselves skilled in subterfuges. The manipulation of examination papers might well be made by men wno hid already learned to manipulate voting papers— but this had been done by them in every instance almost in which a Catholic candidate had been returned by a small majority at a municipal election. An inquiry was conducted with closed doors, and it being decided that the Catholic in question had been guilty of corruption, or that an error had been made in counting the votes— his election was declared void. Meantime, the undoubted facts concerning the status of Catholic teachers engaged in Belgium under the system of 1842 throws the gravest suspicions possible on these "facts" of M. Couvreur's. The other day, for example, the attention of all Eng* land was drawn to the admirable system of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and in the list of prizes given at the Health Exhi bition, where their display was made, ' the names of the Belsian members of the order took a high place. A large number of them were honourably named, among whom iha principal were as follows : — " A gold medal to Brother Alexis ( Marcus Grochet) for excellence of maps — his being the first of their kind introiuced into school illustration. In his address before the Geographical Society of England he clearly showed their superior merits ; a gold medal to Brother Mares (Charles de Pau) for excellence of work "in the Ecclesiastical Art School of Ghent ; a silver medal to Brother Btarianus (Van den Sroeck) for an arithmometer, by which the principles of the metric system, fractions, etc., are fully and lucidly explained ; a silver medal to Brother Memoire, director of the Normal School of Malorme, for a system of illustrations simplifying the study of geometrical projections ; a silver medal to Brother Matey for designs to facilitate the study of complicated figures in the higher grades of perceptive and ornamental work ; a bronze medal to Brother Achilla for his work on methodology." — Testimony like this is worth a hundred diatribes at the mouth of a violent partisan like M. Couvreur. — But, even admitting that M. Couvreur spoke the truth, and that a very large percentage of conscripts had forgotten what they had been taught at school, can we find nothing of the same kind elsewhere 7 What is that for example that Dr. J, M. Strachan writing in the Scotsman of June 7th 1870, tells us concerning Scotland itself, of whose schools Mr. Couvreur has so much that was laudatory to say.—" We boast " says he, " that in Scotland every boy and girl is educated, and in country districts this is to a certain extent true. But a careful inquiry will show that in a vast proportion of cases, this so-called education is entirely useless and was merely a waste of time and money. — Among the class of agricultural labourers, male and female, although all have been to school in their youth, yet nine out of ten have never read a book or a newspaper, and by the time they are twenty or twenty-five years of age, their ability to read is lost and their education has been time and money thrown away." So much then, for the answering quoted by Mr. Gouvreur. It has been produced for a 6et purpose by unscrupulous enemies fully capable of inventing it. It cannot be received as genuine and if it could, it no more proves the inefficiency of Catholic schools in Belgium than the statements made by Dr. Strachan prove that of Presbyterian schools in Scotland.— As to the charges brought against the Catholic Church by Mi*. Couvreur, as we have already said, they are complete fabrications ; the fabrications, however, not of the individual but of the party to which he belongs, and which they repeat the more loudly, the more fully the falsehood is exposed. The violent claptrap is simply that which we are so well accustomed to, and which we disregard as inevitable and the necessary foundation on which Protestantism and atheism in common erect their fantastic and dismal structures. — Of the nature of the liberality meantime, which Mr. Coavreur claims for his party in Belgium it may ba right for us to add a word on two. — He contrasts it with an imaginary sketch given by him of the manner in which the Catholic ecclesiastics filled their schools leaving the expensive buildings of the godless government almost wholly empty, and of the treatment to which he asserts secular teacherp, especially women were subjected— and we admit he did well to mention the women especially, for the ridiculous complaints that > were made were for the most part such as none but a captious woman could make. There for example, was that of the fair teacher who came before the commission to declare that a certain priest had spoiledhernew bonnet by sprinkling its ribbons with holy water, and several others of a similar kind— relating to grievous outrages indeed. M. Couvreur contrasts with all this the conduct of the Government who, he says, did nothing to enforce attendance at their

schools. — Their party, nevertheless, managed to make their influence pretty forcibly felt in sustaining their schools, and did not spara even their own members if they saemed in any degree to fail them. — One of their members for example was rejected by them as a parli .mentary candidate because be had hired some shooting from a Catholic who ie was supposed wou'd devote the proceeds to the support of religious education. M. Fintt, another Liberal candidate, being rejected by the Liberal Association of Brussels, because his daughter had recently been the pupil of a convent school, tried to rehabilitate himself by claiming that he had pulled down a private chapel at his country house in order to prevent his family from frequenting it, as well as to oblige some peasants of the neighbourhood to walk some leagues to hear Mass, and only failed because his statement proved untrue. M. Bara, the Minister of Justice, himself, was most watchful in opposing the Catholic schools and visit* ing his displeasure on those who sent their children to them. A write' in the Month, for example, tells us of a case in which he prohibited a small increase from being made to the salary of a certain man who was organist and sacristan in a country village, because his children attended such a school, and the writer adds that the Moniteur at the time published many similar cases. — Still more glaringly untrue » if possible, is Mr. Convreur's assertion that the Liberals never meant to deprive the Church of any of her liberties. Their legislation wag on the contrary, directly framed against the Church and for the purpose of destroying her. Their pretence that the right of giving religious instruction in the schools had been reserved intact to the priests was false. The priest might only enter there before or after hours to find that his instructions had been mocked and his influence counterbalanced by the infidel teacher. The Budget of Public Worship was cut down, and the intention was evident of reducing it every year until it had been wholly done away with ; foundations, endowments, and pious bequests were diverted from the uses for which they had been intended by the donors, and to crown all the whole revision of the civil code drawn up by At . Laurent of Ghent, and laid before parliament, — not only provided for an anti-Christian state of things in general, but was especially designed to destroy the religious orders, and confiscate all their possessions. Verily for Belgian Liberals to have been determined not to interfere with the rights of the Church must have been for them to have decided that the Church bad no rights at all, and we have no doubt in the world, but that such was the decision they had come to. They had determined to destroy what they looked upon as an abominable superstition, the exit labUis super stitoot ancient heathens, and modern evangelicals and atheists, and to drive the people out of it into rank atheism. As to the exaggerated Coesarism which they aimed at adopting we have nothing now to do with that, but, as shown in M. Laurent's code, it is worthy of study. The Liberalism, however, of the Liberals was well borne witness to by their wicked attacks upon the defenceless Catholics in Brussels and other towns on the defeat of their government. Their philosophy was illustrated in this way most fitly, and philosophic Scots might justly have given it a little consideration in receiving M. Couvreur's harangue of a violent and untrustworthy partisan for what it was worth. We do not know whether there will be any significance to oar contemporary the Evening Star in the fact that one of the journalists who was most prominent in supporting the liberals in their anti-Christian struggle repaired on their defeat to a place on the literary staff of the Intrcmsigeant in Paris, where no doubt he will continue to labour with all his might in the cause which our contemporary, judging by his attitude on the question of godless schools, has also so much at heart, namely that of .rank atheism, and undisguised blasphemy— in support of which, moreover, he has published M. Couvreur's diatribe.

MOBE EVIDENCE

The most notable characteristic of secularism certainly seems to be the sameness of its results in every part of the world. There is no country in which it is established from which we do not receive testimony to this melancholy fact. Now the evidence comes from America — now from France—now from England — but from whatever quarter it comes it is of the like revolting kind, and we learn that in irreligious teaching is the germ of all that is disgraceful. Last week, for example, we found the Anglican Dean cf Salisbury declaring that he had heard right-minded men of every Bhade of opinion in France bewailing the effects of the Godless teaching imposed |upon their country — and we were also given one particular example in which the misconduct of godless schoolchildren had become the scandal of a district. This week the following testimony to a similar effect reaches us from Eaglaiul where it has been published in the letter of a correspondent to the St. James's Gazette, a well-known Protestant organ :—": — " You would not have published the remarkable article entitled 'The Training of Roughs,' which appears in the St. James 1 Gazette of to-day, without good assurance that your contributor spoke of matters with which he waß well conversanf I will not, therefore, attempt to confirm his general statements, which, indeed, would be a task a little beyond my competence. But ther^e. is one point upon which, lam sorry to say, I caa

only too f ally confirm his statement, and that is as to the flow of filthy and obscene language which has come upon the streets since the establishment of Board schools in London. lam an old journalist in both senses of the word, and I have lived for many years in an Inn of Court, from which I could, being then a young and active man, best reach Pall Mall or Parliament-street by passing through the worab courts that lie between Lincoln's-inn fields and Covent Garden. I was out all times of the night., and I usually went home through what were then called the worst streets of Clara-market. Well, 1 venture to say that in none of those years did I hear anything so appalling and disgusting as the language I now hear in quiet and respectable streets every evening from boys and girls of apparent respectability. This scandal of obscene language in the streets from the school children is becoming, I can assure you, in the suburbs of London, a very serious thing. It may be asked, however, what has the London School Board to do with the matter ? I will not answer thiajinquiry with reference to the pain and tronblejof those decent women who find that their children, driven into Board schools, learn there the filthiest words and worse ; but I will ask any one of your readers who lives near a Board school in a rough district to station himself at the doors at the time the boys and girls are dismissed at midday. He will hear language never uttered in the worst rows of the vilest wretches of bygone days." This is very direct testimony to the work that the godfesa schools are actually doing, but let us add to it a glance at the state of society that obtains where such schools have fully accomplished their work. We take the following passage relative to things in America from our contemporary the Brooklyn Catholic Review :— Have we, then, reason to be proud of the results of our system of godless education, as developed all around us in the low tone of public morals, the coarseness, the vulgarity, the selfish ness, the malfeasance in office, the unscrupulous appropriation of others' goods ; above all. the impurity, the open conjugal infidelity and licentionsness, the alarming increase of divorce, the lechery, the prenatal murder of infants to avoid pains and tronbles of maternity ? It needs no labored argument to prove that these are the legitimate fruits of a system of education that does not reach conscience, and fails to make the of the moral nature the chicf '.concern." The common bond of wickedness and filth, then, unites secularism all over the world, and its promoters and protectors are the enemies of humanity.

FBEETHOOGHT ADVANCES,

The appointment of the Hon. Robert Stout as Minister of Education is one of some significance. It is that of a sectarian leader to a position in which he will be able signally to serve his sect, and where he will have the power of authoritatively directing the propaganda, by which the numbers of his disciples are to be increased. The secular schools are the nursery of unbelief, and in them are to instructed the congregations that shall hereafter fill the lyceums— so that Mr. Stout is very suitably employed in presiding over these institutions. The turn of fortune's wheel, in fact, by which such a condition of things has been brought about for him has been singularly happy. A man less secure of his position, indeed, might have shrunk from assuming the office that Mr. Stout has thus taken upon him — and might have feared that the boldness of his undertaking would have given rise to some alarms or qualms of conscience on the part of tnose whose support is necessary to him, and who are not supposed to look upon his' objects with favour — so that they would be driven to combine in offering to him an opposition that must prove injurious. Mr. Stont, however, understands the temper of the Colony better than that. He knows perfectly well that the admiration publicly professed for him the other day at the Duuedin High School by the Rev. Dr. Stuart and the Rev. Mr. Fitchett was no senseless form of words. He fully understands the significance of the fact celebrated last Sunday night by a distinguished visitor of his sect, when speaking at the Lyceum, that he is the first Freethinker who has been appointed premier in any English-speaking country. He understands, in short, the opportunity that lies open to him, and if he is prepared to take advantage of it, he is hardly very much to blame for doing so. It is generally believed that the Hon. Robert Stout does not propose to himself statesmanship as a final career.— -Perhaps if there were any probability of the elective Governorship, or, still better, if the presidency of a Republic presented itself in even the distant future, the career in question might seem worthy of the devot'oa of all the honourable gentleman's life — but of neither office does there appear much prospect, so long as the Colony continues to be a dependency of the British Empire, so long it is almost certain that our Governor will be appointed by the Imperial Government. And as to the idea of a Republic, there is danger in the very thought with the eyes of German despots upon our neighbourhood. The summit of the hon. gentleman's ambition is, therefore, believed to be the attainment of the ermine, and the time that is supposed to present itself to him in his most sanguine dreams is that at which he will be styled Sir Robert Stout, and will rank as Chief Justice of New Zealand, To prepare for that auspicious season, then, may well form a most laudably

object in the eyes of the Hon. Robert Stout, and is one that doubtless already obtains his bast attention. We have seen that the hon. gentleman is very capable of accommodating himself to circumstances. " Fads " and philosophies are all vary well in their place, but it must not be supposed that they are to be allowed serionsly to interfere with the interests of the eminent maa who professes them — at times of need thsy can be laid aside, or they may perhaps be wholly given up if the occasion require it. To give up, however, the chosen occupation of yeirs, and renounce all the protestations of devotion to a cause that have accompanied it, is hardly what any man can do with credit to hiauelf, or without: incurring the suspicion of inconsistancy if not of hypocrisy. Oar Premier, even as Sir Bopert Stout Chief Justice of the Colony, could scarcely resign his place upon the Lyceum platform, and yet, as things are, the Colony might wonder over-much to behold its Chief Justice in such a posture. To educate the Colony therefore beforehand to the point required would be a noble object, and Mr. Stout ia assuming the position of Minister of Education may have had some such notioa in his head. He is placed thus in a position to increase the number of hi* sect and to secure for himself the certainty of continuing to preside over it, without the risk of seeming in the eyeß of the colony to compromise his high judicial position, when of course he attains to it. Mr. Stout, then, understands w at he is about in assuming the portfolio of Edu He gauged the mind of the Presbyterians to whom he owes his position, and on whose support he must rely for the attainment of his objects. It was made evident to him the other day when Dr. Stuart praised him in public at the High School, and, as we have already said, no men more fully than th 3 Freethinkers themselves understand the significance of his Premiership. Some men, indeed, lay much stress on the trifling fact that the Dunedin Lyceum is asserted to occupy the aite of the first Presbyterian church erected in the place, but that might ba a little thing, and due to an accident of no significance —especially since within a stone's throw stands an infinitely finer Presbyterian church, occupying a much better site. The significant fact is that the men who built the Church play into the hand of the man who built the Lyceum, and who is determined, as by their connivance hi. is made able, to fill the Church with the doctrines of the Lyceum. Mr. Stout, then, under the patronage of the Kirk, or at least with the full approval of its ministers and members, assumes the position of Minister of Edncation, and proceeds with the propaganda of his sect, while he makes provision for continuing without scandal or offence to preside over it, The turn of fortune's wheel that has brought all this about for him is, we say again, a happy one.