Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 45, 9 November 1899, Page 1

Current Topi cs AT HOME AND ABROAD.

For the past half-century women have been women vs. men : ' crowding ' men pretty considerably in a the struggle great number of callings that had hitherto for been deemed strictly tapu against the fair employment. sex. Thus we have now lady lawyers, physicians and surgeons, dentists, editors, accountants, stenographers, typists, sculptors, directors of theatres, railway managers, tramway superintendents, architects, farmers, and printers. In England there are said to be at least a hundred female blacksmiths. In the United States there are several hundred female ' ordained ministers ' of the Baptist and other denominations. The first lady war correspondent was Mrs. Clara Benck Colby, founder, editor, and proprietor of the Chicago Woman's Tribune. Two others (one a titled lady) have gone to the front in the present Boer campaign. And at least two women have filled the office of public executioner — one the highly educated daughter of a medical man in Salt Lake City. This female invasion of the male domain is now being followed by the small beginnings of a revanche — in other words, of a male invasion of some of the occupations long exclusively carried on by the members of the gentler sex. Boys and youths have for some time past been ousting the ' female help 'in the large cities of England. And according 10 the Aye Maria many men are acting as ' maid servants ' in homes in the United States. This is how the Aye puts its : ' A curious result of the usurpation of manly work by women is that men are going into domestic employment in surprisingly large numbers. Hundreds of men have been hired as maid-servants in Chicago within a short period, and the want columns of the newspapers call for yet more. Many of those who have responded to the call are elderly men, unfit for outdoor employment, and they are glad to find a place where they are assured of plenty of wholesome food and fair wages; but many other applicants are young men. They are not employed as butlers or coachmen, but for cooking and housework — sweeping, washing, scrubbing, polishing, etc. Strange to say, these men have raised the wage-scale for domestic service about 20 per cent.' The divorce evil was one of the direct wives for natural results of the ' reformed ' teaching sale. which — as far as in it lay — trampled under foot the old Catholic doctrine of the unity, sacramental character, and indissolubility of the marriage tie. But its grossest outcome was the sale of wives — a not infrequent incident of life among the lower classes in England and America during the early part of the present century. Nor, as we shall see, is it altogether unknown at the present time. Such events were, of course, merely an outrage upon decency, and had no legal effect whatever. Chambers is, however, witness to the fact that the public belief in the right of sale was widespread among the lower orders of the British population. From the Annual Register, Chambers' Book of Days, and newspaper reports we learn of many instances of such sales having been actually effected, most frequently by auction, sometimes 'by private treaty. 1 But, for manifest reasons, no accurate idea of the total number of instances of this brutal traffic can ever be reached in our day. The published instances of wife-sale made a deep impression upon Continental people, and forty or fifty years ago were referred to by several of their writers with great horror as evidence of the low state of Protestant civilisation in Great Britain. An instance of these animadversions has been brought forward and denounced as an evidence of French Anglophobia by a raving, shrieking, hair-tearing, frothing no-Popery epileptic in the September number of the National Review. We did him the honour of an uncomplimentary notice last week in the matter of bull-fighting in France. Had the man even a slight acquaintance with the social conditions of the non-Catholic

masses in England at the period we refer to, he would probably have shorn much of the indignant exuberance of his verbosity. The same remark applies to the writer of an article on the subject which appeared in the Egmont Post of October 28. * * ♦ The sale of his wife was one of the poor man's methods of divorce. Another and rarer expedient was a document in the nature of a lease. Both were invalid in law. Wife-sales— according to Chambers — were regarded ' with little beyond a passing smile ' in the early part of the century. They would be looked upon with unmingled horror in our day. But for the life of us we cannot see the radical difference that exists in the moral order between wife-sale and wife-lease and the remarriages that usually follow the divorce-court proceedings that are becoming a rampant evil of such vast dimensions in these colonies. The following are some of the instances of wife-sale that most readily occur to our minds: — ' In iß;s,' says Chambers in his Book of Days, 'a man held a regular auction in the market-place at Pontefract, offering his wife at a minimum bidding of one shilling, and " knocking her down " for eleven shillings.' Five years later, in 1820, a fellow named Brouchet penned his wife in the cattlemarket at Canterbury, with a rope around her neck, and sold her to a young man of the place for five shillings. In 1826 a man named Hilton, of Lodsworth, publicly sold his wife for thirty shillings. He likewise paid a toll of one shilling upon the sale. The magistrates called upon the toll-collector to justify his action, whereupon that bright particular star of an official pointed to the following market bye-law: 'Any article not enumerated in these bye-laws pays one shilling. The next wife-sale of which we have made a record took place at Carlisle on April 7 in the year of grace 1832. The vendor was a farmer named Joseph Thompson. Joseph led his wife by a straw halter, announced the sale through the bell-man, and finally disposed of his spouse — to whom he had been married only three years — to one Henry Mears for twenty shillings and a Newfoundland dog. The Annual Register for 1832 publishes a droll speech which Thompson made on the occasion. Two years later (in 1834.) another woman was publicly sold, with a halter round her neck, at the cattle market at Birmingham ; but the local papers omitted to report the sum at which the ' lot ' was ' cleared.' In the following year (1835) a wife changed hands at the comparatively high price of £15. In 1837 a Yorkshire man sold, or attempted to sell, his wife in public* He was haled before the West Riding Sessions and, to his great astonishment and indignation, received a month's imprisonment, with hard labour. This sentence, says the historian, caused ' a good deal of surprise ' among the ignorant peasantry, the right to sell wives ' being believed in more extensively than we are apt to imagine. 1 • • • There is a break in our record here, and we take a hop-step-and-jump over 21 years before we strike the case of Hartley Thompson of evil fame. The time was the year 1858 ; the place a beer-shop at Little Hor ton, near Bradford. Thompson led in his wife — described by the local papers as a pretty young woman— with a ribbon around her neck instead of the traditional rope or straw halter. According to Chambers the sale was duly announced beforehand by a crier or bell-man. It was, we presume, duly effected. In the following year (1859) a man sold his wife at Dudley. The price was a modest sixpence. (The average price of negro slaves in the United States in 1840 was about £120.) Three years later (in 1862) a man named Selby sold his wife publicly on the steps of the market-cross for a pint of ale Several wife-sales took place as recently as the eighties. An* English paper before us tells how in 1881, during the hearing of a court case, one of the witnesses testified that she had been sold by her husband to a man named Dun for twenty-five shillings. 'And I have it to show in black and white/ said the saucy dame, ' with a receipt stamp on it, as I don't wish people to think I'm not a respectable woman.' In May, 1882* as we learn from an English weekly, a woman was sold by her husI band at Alfreton (Derbyshire) for a glass of ale. A few

months later one George Drennan sold his wife at Belfast si (Ireland), by written contract, * for the sum of one penny and a ol dinner.' He subsequently repented of his conduct, brought cl an action to regain possession of the discarded partner of his e^ joys and woes, and then, in the police-court, the ' murder came F out.' As recently as 1892 two men put up their wives for sale ' i at Leeds. One of the ladies fetched a guinea ; the other only T live shillings. 'The purchaser of the dear "lot,"' says an p English non-Catholic contemporary, • made an excellent thing Ji by his venture, as on the following day he disposed of the 01 woman for no less a sum than £2 10s.' The latest instance of h wife-sale of which we have a record was brought to light during h the hearing of a case in the Chancery Division, London, before a Mr. Justice Kekewich towards the close of last year (1898). IIn the course of the evidence the fact was elicited that one of w the parties to the suit, previous to leaving the country, had sold p his wife for £250. 'It is difficult indeed,' says Chambers, si speaking of the Yorkshire wife sales, 'to credit how such r< things can be, unless the wife be more or less a consenting t< party. This supposition once made, however, so cheap a sub- f< stitute for the divorce court becomes intelligible.' The whole h of this abominable traffic is merely the result of brutal feeling g and gross ignorance of the nature and sanctity of the marriage o tie. To assert, however, that such sales were of every-day or w very frequent occurrence would be an evidence of either great 5 ignorance or of strong feeling. On the other hand, to voci- a ferate that such things never took place is but an expression of s even denser ignorance of the social and religious condition of h the English non-Catholic masses during a great part of the v present century. The matter is simply a blot upon our boasted a civilisation. But it is hard, after all, to blame the ignorant c multitude for putting into practice, in their own way, the v theories of the marriage bond which had been dinned into 1 their minds by their religious leaders for close on 300 years. c Lord Macaulay once said that there is no t AW spectacle ;>o iidiculous as the British public in lenolish one of its periodical fits of morality. In such £ drbyfus. circumstances its voice can only give utterance I to one or both of two cries : a loud ' hosanna ' j Or a sky-piercing 'crucify him, crucify him.' In the Dreyfus case t the ' hosanna' has been for Captain Dreyfus and his friends ; the t death-cry is against the French nation, the decadence and hope- 2 lesschuckle-headedness and irredeemable wickedness of which is c supposed to be proved beyond the reach of yea or nay by the j chance vote of one of the members of the court-martial that sat at \ Rennes. In our article on the subject in last week's issue we > referred in passing to a great number of cases even worse than 1 that of Captain Dreyfus that had marked the history of 1 British courts-martial. We did not, however, follow the folly 1 of the newspapers and regard such instances of miscarriage of 1 justice as evidence of the decadence even of the British army, i much less of the nation or empire at large. A recent and crying English Dreyfus case which had escaped our notice is thus told by Mr. Labouchere in Truth of September 21 :—: — ' Surgeon Lee, of the Ringarooma, was dismissed the Service and chucked ashore in Australia for putting the commanding officer pn the sick list when he had every reason to believe that officer irresponsible for his actions and in a ' condition which might endanger the safety of the ship. The ' case excited nearly as much excitement in Australia as the ' Dreyfus case in England. The court-martial deliberately excluded an 1 the evidence — that of no fewer than thirty witnesses — on which the prisoner relied to prove his bona fides. One of the members of the Court— the president, if I remember rightly— was a near relative of one of the First Lords of the Admiralty. Mr. Goschen was First Lord. The case was brought up in Parliament, and Mr. Goschen, very much like M. Cavaignac on a later occasion, silenced criticism by giving a statement of the facts which was demonstrably untrue. Surgeon Lee accordingly, for doing what he honestly believed to be his duty, was expelled from the service in disgrace. In one respect the case was far worse than that of Dreyfus, for there was no conflict of evidence which made it difficult to arrive at the truth ; the result was arrived at by deliberately excluding all material evidence for the prisoner. The JudgeAdvocate approved the exclusion of this evidence. In this case I can remember speaking strongly about the attitude and proceedings of the Court and the character of the answers given by Mr. Goschen in Parliament. But it never occurred to me to suggest that the members of the Court, the Naval Lord at Home, the Judge-Advocate-General, and the First Lord of the Admiralty were consciously engaged in a conspiracy to convict a man whom they knew to be innocent. In making such a charge against all the heads of the French Army, the Dreyfusites appear to me to undo their case and put themselves in the wrong. 1 America, like England, has a tolerably AMERICAN plentiful supply of Dreyfus cases— all its DReyFusbs, very own. In the article on the Dreyfus male case in our last issue we made brief and AND female, passing reference to the cases of Generals Stone and Fitz-John Porter. Both cases occurred during the course of the great Civil War of the

sixties. In his Twenty Years of Congress Blame tells the case of General Stone. One fine day in 1862 the General was clapped into solitary confinement. No charge was made, or even hinted, against him. No form of trial was attempted. For six weary months he was left under lock and key in his ' solitary ' cell and branded before the nation as a malefactor. Till this hour the cause of his arrest, imprisonment, and persecution has never been disclosed In 1863 General FitzJohn Porter was court-martialled. The charge against him was one of disobedience to the orders of General Pope at Manassas. There was scarcely a shred of evidence against him. But a victim was wanted in connection with the disastrous actions about Bull Run. Porter was as good as any other. He was therefore found guilty and cashiered. For nineteen weary years he endured the disgrace. At the close of that period he succeeded in establishing his innocence so conclusively that Congress voted him 75,000 dollars as compensation, reinstated him in his old position in the army, and restored to him his full measure of civic rights — a poor return, after all, for the nineteen long years of moral and mental anguish that had poisoned the best period of his life. But the most disgraceful Dreyfus case furnished by the annals of American courts- martial is that which ended in the foul murder of a woman, Mrs. Surratt. ' This,' says the Philadelphia Catholic Standard of September 16, ' is one of the blackest chapters in all our history. Mrs. Surratt was done to death without the shadow of a legal pretext. Simply because she happened to have kept a boarding house wherein one of the men charged with the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln had hired a room, she was seized, hurried before a so-called military court and condemned almost without the form of a trial. The woman was allowed no defence — let those who howl about Dreyfus mark this fact. All the proceedings against her were closed to the public. She was hurried to death in much the same way as a sheep to the shambles. But the worst part of the story is that, although the commission which condemned her recommended her to mercy, the recommendation was abstracted by the head of the Department of Justice, Joseph Holt, and so never reached the hands of the President, Andrew Johnson. The facts came out a little after the tragedy. General Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, is the only member of that military tribunal who still survives, and in the shocking incidents of the murder of Mrs. Surratt he could easily find the groundwork for another piece of literature perhaps more true to life and fact than that which has brought him so much renown and so many thousands of dollars. But we do not want to hear of such things. It is unpleasant to be reminded of them. We are only concerned in the establishment of the proposition that France is a hopelessly decadent nation and so deserving of the opening of the Seventh Seal above her firmament. Our virtue is exemplary, even though it be dreadful.' The Dreyfus case reminds us that the concerning military spy has played a bigger rdle in history > spies. than most people would at first blush be \ willing to accord him. By the very nature 1 of his occupation he must ever remain in the background, . even of the facts in history which he furnishes the means of i creating or directing. We read with glowing interest Napier's ', rounded periods that tell of Wellington's marvellous series of r successes in the Peninsula Campaign. But not one man in a thousand nowadays is accustomed to connect the name of the '* spy, Colquhoun Grant, with Wellington's famous victories. > And yet Wellington himself was one of the first to admit that 5 without the vital information supplied to him by this prince of > military spies, he could scarcely have achieved a fraction of the r successes which marked his wonderful campaign in the ' Peninsula. In the Crimea Lord Raglan neglected the employ1 ment of spies, and, as a consequence, settled down to the long t and costly siege of Sebastopol, which— had he been properly r informed of the weak points of the defence — he could 3 have captured at the outset with a few hundred v determined men. The British military and naval - authorities are well-equipped now in the matter of c spies, both at home and abroad — paid out of d Ao.ooo which is annually set aside for the benefit of what is n known as the Secret Service. The Petit Journal (Pans) c recently published an article declaring that France is being ,t over-run by British spies. The London Morning Post is c equally positive that Great Britain is swarming with Russian •t spies. The German Press is quite as loud in its denunciations a of French and Russian beauties of damaged reputation who are c said to act in the same capacity in the Fatherland. The British 1- military authorities some time ago expelled two supposed Spanish spies— Lieutenant Carranza and Senor Dubosc— from Canada. A high-placed Italian officer was some time [y ago seized near a French Alpine fortress and subjected to a ts protracted detention. The Dreyfus case arose out of the is undoubted sale of French army mobilisation plans to the id German military authorities. So did a quite recent, though Is less famous, court-martial in Austria. And a prominent es British Foreign Office official recently declared that at no le period in history has espionage been so universally employed

and so highly paid as at the present time. The very nations that most condemn its use by others are themselves in it up to the eyes. Pope Leo XIII. is known to have set his pope leo and face as hard as flint against Jew-baiting. THE jews. This fact gives an air of antecedent probability to the statement which appeared in some of the New Zealand papers a few weeks ago, to the effect that he is preparing an encyclical denouncing root and branch the anti-Semitic movement which has for some years been more or less endemic in certain parts of Europe. Some of our readers may remember the stir that was caused some years ago by the publication of Drumont J s too famous — or rather, infamous — book, La France yuive. Among the exploded calumnies revived by the imaginative and uncritical Drumont was the infamous story — condemned by five Popes — which ascribed to the Jews the ritual slaughter of Christian children in connection with their Passover celebrations. Drumont — who regards himself as a true son of the Church — sent a copy of his publication to the Vatican Library. He received in due course the usual polite official note acknowledging the arrival of the volume. The Pope, of course, had neither seen nor read the book. After a little time, however, his Holiness's attention was directed to its character and contents by the late Cardinal Manning. Whereupon the enlightened and truth-loving old Pontiff denounced La France Juive as a foolish and wicked production. Within the past few weeks the Osservatore Romano — which may be regarded as the mouthpiece of the Vatican — published an article declaring that the Jews have been humanely treated by the Popes, and strongly disavowing the fierce anti-Semitism of M. Drumont. One of the most curious features of this evil movement in France is this : that its two most violent propagandists, M. Arthur Meyer, director of Le Gaulois, and M. Polonais, director of Le Soir, are both Jews. • • • The feeling and spirit of the Church has ever — despite the fractiousness of certain of her sons — been opposed to the foolish and criminal movement that now goes by the evil name of anti-Semitism. Among the many Popes who stood by the Jewish people in dark and evil days, the name of Innocent 111. must ever hold a foremost place. Frederic Hurter in his Life of that great Pontiff says : • The little knowledge which we possess of those times, the dislike of the ecclesiastical authority which was in those ages the centre of the social movement, the foolish boast of modern progress, cause us to regard the Middle Age as an epoch in which only despotism reigned and brute force was the sole expression of civil and ecclesiastical life. Against such prejudices we adduce the Constitution of Innocent 111. regarding the Hebrews, which bears upon it the impress of the most benign humanity and sets forth the idea which the Pope had of the relations between Jews and Christians. " The Jews, Innocent wrote, are living witnesses of the true faith. It is not lawful for Christians to extirpate the race. No one ought to disturb them, because in their synagogues they fulfil what the Law prescribes. Although they prefer to live on in their obstinacy rather than believe in the prophecies and learn to understand the mysteries of the Law or recognise therein the Christ, they have nevertheless a right to our protection. Wherefore we willingly grant it to them, as our predecessors have done. No Christian can compel a Hebrew to receive baptism, since, being thus forced, he never has the faith ; and if they wish of their own free will to receive it, nobody has any right to offer them on that account any form of insult. Let no Christian dare to injure them in life or limb, to take their goods without sentence of a court, or alter their customs in the places where they live. It is unlawful to disturb their festivals, by obliging them to render services which they could do on other days. Let no one dare to lay waste their cemeteries or for money disinter their dead : all this under penalty of excommunication." ' • * * Many of Innocent's successors did as his predecessors had done, and the position of the Jewish people at Rome was on the whole far more tolerable than it was in any other part of Christendom. The action of Martin Luther, the standardbearer of the Reformation, forms a strong contrast to that of Pope Innocent 111. The deep-drinking German ex-friar thus storms against them ; — ' Set fire to their synagogues and schools ; and let what does not burn be covered up with earth or buried so deep that the eye of man may never more see stone or any trace of it ! Let their dwellings be demolished and razed to the ground ; let their prayer-books and Talmuds be taken from them ! Let their rabbis be forbidden, under penalty of death, to ever again teach them anything ; every kind of right and public protection be denied them ; trade be forbidden to them ; everything they haye — goods, jewellery, gold, silver — be taken from them ; and, lastly, let them be hunted out of every place like madmen !' And thus the Reformation opened with the fiercest anti-Semite cry that ever issued from human lips.

Full many a biter gets bitten ; full many a the man that cuts and trims a rod for his godless neighbour's back feels the weight of it first on schools. his own ; and, in Scripture phrase, many a one ' hnth opened a pit and dvg 1 it, and he is fallen into the hole he made.' And yet it is not always a case for a triumphant 'serve him right!' For the punishment may be at times too severe either for folly or for crime. The godless system of public instruction is a melancholy example in point. In the United States, in Australia, in New Zealand, the system was supported by practically the whole influence of the Protestant denominations so long as they saw in it a rod with which to scourge ' Rome ' and to put a check to the progress of the Catholic Church in those new lands. Thanks to their schools, the Catholic body has experienced, by comparison, only a small share of the disastrous results of the godless up-bring-ing of youth during so considerable a portion of the most impressionable period of their lives. But it has scored and cross-hatched and torn the Protestant denominations like a cat-o'-nine tails armed with spur-rowels and fish-hooks. They cry out at their annual synods and assemblies — now in progress — and pass empty resolutions against the godless character of the schools, and deplore the decline of family life, the waning respect for parents, the juvenile immorality that is rampant in the land, the decreased birth-rate, the falling church-attendance, their churches' failing grip upon the masses, and heaven knows what evils besides. And in the meantime Curfew Bills are discussed ; unquotably shocking evidence of wholesale juvenile depravity through the land is laid before a Committee of the Legislative Council ; and a Juvenile Depravity Bill and a Young People Protection Bill and an Age of Consent Bill — not to mention others of a kindred import — all combine to testify to the drift which is setting towards a general revolt against religious beliefs which usually follows — as in Germany — a widespread rebellion against certain of the ten commandments of God. • * * We have recently shown how the same sad tale is told elsewhere. In one of its recent issues', the New York Presbyterian Observer strongly contends that ' non-sectarian ' public school gives no moral stamina to the child. It then goes on to say :— Statistics Bhow that, notwithstanding great advance in school methods, youthful criminality is on the increase. When we come to think of salvation and of freeing the world from crime we are obliged to turn to Christianity as the only system which has effective power for such work, and if the school is to accomplish its true mission, it must avail itself of all the helpful influences which Christianity has put within its reach. The Right Rev. J. S. Johnson, a Protestant Bishop of Western Texas (U.S.A.), thus lashed the godless schools in a discourse delivered at St. Paul's Church, Boston, about the middle of September : — The intellectual education ia only partial education, and, at least in my section, the public schools are godless. We no longer have any religious education in this country, except twenty minutes a week in Sunday school, where nice young ladies, who know little about it themselves, instruct the children in the Bible. The churches, with the exception of the Roman Church, have lost control of the labouring classes ; the young men no longer go to church, and the congregationa are composed of women and children, with a few old men. Some time ago we showed, on the evidence of a noted American statistician, that the United States Catholics, who form about one-sixth of the population of the country, make up one-third of its church-goers. The explanation of this arises in part from the Catholic theological attitude towards Sunday observance, but chiefly to the fact that the Church in the United States retains a far firmer hold of the mass of her people than the denominations do of theirs. A Boston Baptist organ — the Watchman — puts the matter in a way of its own. The policy of the Protestant todies (it says) is to let their children get their mental training in secular schools, and find their religious beliefs afterwards as best they can. ' But our Romanist friends,' it adds, ' are saying most emphatically : " We will see to it that our children get their religious bias first, and then they may seek other advantages if they will." Does it need a prophet to foretell which, on this 'plan, will in the long run win in the race for supremacy?' • * ♦ The superiority of the Catholic school as a moral agent lies not merely in the bald fact that instruction in religion forms part of its daily routine. It lies deeper than this— namely, in the fact that education with Catholics is to-day what it has ever been with us, through and through, a matter of deep spiritual concern. It is, in ideal conditions, entrusted to teachers who are well equipped with knowledge, devoted to it as a sacred life-calling, not for the sake of mere ' bawbees,' but for the same unselfish ends that send so many noble bands of men and women into the plague hospital and the leper colony and the orphan asylum and the mission field. It is, in fact, but one department of the Church's great and ever-growing works of charity and religion. You will find, undoubtedly, in the secular schools many men and

women of noble aims and high ideals. But they are simply superior to their surroundings. The secularisation of instruction has had this deplorable result: It has made teaching not a matter of religion and conscience, but simply a matter of business, of profit, of remuneration — a mere metier or worldly calling, with no reference whatever to its nobler aims or higher possibilities in the moral order. In so far it has lowered the ideal of teacher and of pupil alike. It has placed the pupil on a lower moral plane by making the be-all and the end-all of hJs ' education ' — so called — purely and vulgarly utilitarian : a lop-sided, left-handed, soulless thing which would do for possible Frankensteins, but not for human children that have moral faculties to develop and souls to save or lose. The tone of school life and the cause of Christianity among the pupils will not be improved by the quack remedy of the synods and conferences : the impossible and self-contradictory idea of an 'undogmatic ' and 'unsectarian ' Bible-teaching which — if, per ifnpossibile — it could be carried out would simply resolve itself into a general license of unbelief. The teaching of religion must, from the very nature of the case, be dogmatic teaching. Religion becomes a part of the child's belief through the belief of the teacher. Which is but another way of saying that to teach religion and morals at all in school — that is, dogmatically — the teacher must himself be a believer, and not one of the many avowed latudinarians or agnostics or infidels who would spend their Sundays endeavouring to undo the teachings of the week-days. We don't want the schools to be godless. Neither do we want them to be Protestantised. As little do we desire to see them turned into so many latitudinarian training centres. There is only one way out of the difficulty. Let the synods and the conferences take heart of grace, pluck out of their minds and bury a thousand fathoms deep their distrust or dislike of their Catholic fellow-citizens, and frankly adopt the Catholic view of education. It is the only solution of a difficulty which bids fair to land their churches in the position of collapse and mossgrown decay in which German Protestantism finds itself today.