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The great Roman Catholic Church . . . is unquestionably right in the contention that the whole system as it now exists is morally a negation.

The great company of educators and the whole American community need to be sternly warned that if morality cannot be specifically taught in the public schools without admitting religious dogma, then religious dogma may have to be taught in them. For righteousness is essential to a people's very existence. And righteousness does not come reading or writing does.

by nature any more than
We are within measurable distance of the time when society
may for its own sake go on its knees to any factor which
can be warranted to make education compatible with and
inseparable from morality, letting that factor do it on its
own terms and teach therewith whatsoever it lists.

The Century Magazine, November, 1903, published the article which contained these words:

Indeed, the number of crimes committed by the highly educated is an alarming feature of the situation. The list of defaulting bookkeepers, bank-tellers, clerks, and college graduates constantly lengthens, reflecting a lurid light upon the theories of those who attempt to account for the origin of all sin, vice, and crime by ignorance.

Reasons for dissatisfaction with the results of the education of the negro were presented by Governor Candler, of Georgia, in his annual message. Strict justice demanding only that the negro shall have expended on his schools his own share of the taxes, the Governor attempts to show that philanthropy and interests of the State do not require greater expenditure. He

says:

If by education in the text-books taught in the schools crime was diminished, as many of us at one time hoped would be the case, there might be some reason for imposing even heavier taxes upon our people for the support of schools. But this is not true, for it is a startling fact, established by the experience of thirty years, that, while under our system of free schools illiteracy has rapidly decreased, especially among our colored population, crime has much more rapidly increased among them. Ninety

per cent of the crimes committed by negroes are committed by those who have had the opportunities of free schools, and only ten per cent by the ex-slaves, who are illiterate,

while ninety per cent of the property acquired by the race since emancipation is in the hands of the ex-slaves and not in the hands of those educated in the free schools.

Further testimony bearing on the point raised by Mr. Morley, on the relations between secular instruction and religious knowledge, is here given from very competent witnesses. Rev. Hamilton Schuyler, Rector of Trinity Church, Trenton, New Jersey, December, 1902:

Another point, which it seems to me calls for our admiration, is the supreme importance attributed by Roman Catholics to the religious education of their children. Viewing the matter from this standpoint, we must admit that they are justified in establishing their own schools, where their children may be taught the religion which they profess. The absolute necessity of inculcating the truths of religion while the child is yet in its most impressionable stage is one which is generally recognized by all parties. Bodies other than Roman Catholic attempt to do this in Sunday-School. Roman Catholics believe that such teaching of religion is not sufficient. They desire that religion shall enter into the daily life of their child, and that a knowledge of it shall go hand in hand with secular studies. Who shall say that they are wrong? Certainly the fact that they willingly bear the great expense of supporting their parish schools, when they might send their children without cost to the public schools, is the best evidence that they are animated by purely conscientious motives.

The Methodist writes editorially:

In our judgment the denominational schools of the land, as compared with the purely secular or State schools, are on moral grounds incomparably the safer. Our State institutions, as a general thing, are the hotbeds of infidelity—not less than of vice. That unbelief should be fostered and fomented therein is not unnatural. We thoroughly believe that our Church should invest at least ten millions of dollars in the next ten years in denominational schools. Why? Because we belive this system is the AMERICAN ONE AND THE ONLY SAFE ONE.-Literary Digest, Vol. VII., No. 7. President Hyde, of Bowdoin College, before the Massachusetts Teachers' Association of Boston, November, 1896:

The public school must do more than it has been doing

if it is to be a real educator of youth and an effective supporter of the State. It puts the pen of knowledge in the child's hand, but fails to open the treasures of wisdom to his heart and mind. Of what use is it to teach a child how to read, if he cares to read nothing but the sensational accounts of crime? These people who know how to read and write and cipher, and know little else,-these are the people who furnish fuel for A. P. A. fanaticism; who substitute theosophy for religion, passion for morality, impulse for reason, crazes and caprice for conscience and the Constitution. From the Educational Review, February, 1898:

A little less than fifty per cent of all the children of our country frequent any Sunday-School. The meaning of these figures is simply overwhelming. More than one-half of the children of this land now receive no religious education. Even this feature does not show all the truth. It seems to admit that those who attend Sunday-School are receiving proper religious instruction; but every one knows this cannot be granted.-Dr. Levi Seeley, of the State Normal School, Trenton, N. J.

Dr. Wallace Radcliffe (Presbyterian):

In our Church-life we recognize the Trinity: home, school, and Church, a triple cord not easily broken. The home is a school, the school is a home. It is an unintelligible Christianity which loses sight of this important factor (the school) in our Church. It is something that your children go to school; it is more that they go to a school of your own religious belief. Therefore we summon you to bring up your children in your own faith. Let us establish schools and teach our religious convictions.—

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Washington, D. C., October 7, 1900.

Rev. Dr. E. T. Wolf, Professor at Gettysburg Theological Seminary, before the Evangelical Alliance:

Moral training has, for the most part, been cast out of our public schools. Every faculty, except the highest and noblest, is exercised and invigorated; but the crowning faculty-that which is designed to animate and govern all others-is contemptuously ignored; and, unless its education can be secured, our young men and women will be graduated from our schools as moral imbeciles. This country is facing a grave social problem.-The Philadelphia Press, December

4, 1901.

Professor William James, of Harvard, received that university's degree of LL.D., and made a speech after the commencement dinner, which has attracted wide attention. The following passages have an especial interest for those who hold to Catholic educational ideals:

The old notion that book-learning can be a panacea for the vices of society, lies pretty well shattered to-day. I say this in spite of certain utterances of the president of this university to the teachers last year. That sanguinehearted man seemed then to think that if the schools would only do their duty better, social vice might cease. But vice will never cease. Every level of culture breeds its own peculiar brand of it, as sure as one soil breeds sugar cane and another soil breeds cranberries. If we were asked that disagreeable question: What are the bosom-vices of the level of culture which our land and day have preached? we should be forced, I think, to give the still more disagreeable answer, that they are swindling and adroitness, and the indulgence of swindling and adroitness and cant, and sympathy with cant-natural fruits of that extraordinary idealization of success in the mere outward sense of getting there, and getting there on as big a scale as we can, which characterizes our present generation. What was reason given to man for, some satirist has said, except to enable him to invent reasons for what he wants to do? We might say the same of education. We see college graduates on every side of every public question. Harvard men defend our treatment of our Filipino allies as a masterpiece of policy and duty. Harvard men, as journalists, pride themselves on producing copy for any side that may enlist them. There is not a public abuse for which some advocate may not be found.

In the successful sense, then in the worldly sense, in the club sense, to be a college man, even a Harvard man affords no sure guarantee for anything but a more educated cleverness in the service of popular idols and vulgar ends.

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The influence of the Hebrew people in the secular school system of the United States has been very potent in certain places, and, owing to vigorous protests from their religious leaders, the selections for Bible reading are limited exclusively to the Old Testament. Non-Conformist advocates of the Bible, and the Bible only, in England and elsewhere, should consider

this important fact, that the children of Christians in many schools may never hear the words of Christ read aloud. From this source a more aggressive movement may be expected in the near future. According to information which has reached the editor of the Ave Maria:

The school question may still be far from settlement; but interest in it is evidently becoming more intense, since Jews now array themselves against Protestants, and a Jewish editor is found to advocate some constitutional amendment for the preservation of our educational system against its Catholic and Protestant opponents.

The non-orthodox Jews, who see no reason why moral instruction should be given in American schools, are, naturally enough, opposed to any change in the existing system. That Catholics, besides educating their own children, should be taxed for the education of others, does not strike them as being in the least unjust. Their own religion is not much to them, but this does not at all lessen their antagonism to other religions.

A writer in the Chicago Israelite, of recent date, thus declares himself:

The Roman Catholic Church is only fighting for the control of a portion of the money raised by taxation for school purposes; the Protestant bigots want the whole of it. The Catholic priests would be content to control the primary schools-or, rather, to give the children primary education in their own way; the Protestant pastors want to be in control of the whole educational system-primary, intermediate, and high schools, and the universities in addition. They will not accept defeat, and no sooner are Protestant religious exercises abolished in a school than they try to sneak them back under the guise of unsectarian hymns, prayers, etc. . . It is the Protestant fanatics, with their sectarian hymns and prayers, which they insist upon children of other denominations listening to, who are a menace and a nuisance.

The editor of the Israelite writes very frankly in these words:

A considerable number of Protestant Christian representative bodies have apparently come to the conclusion that their Catholic brethren arrived at some time ago-i. e., that, unless they can control the primary education of the children,

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