If civil liberties ought not to be granted to Catholics as well as to other persons, what is the system proposed to be applied to them?

Persecution and tyranny, to be exercised according as the various governments of the day shall think advisable.

To such a pitch of "civilization and progress" have we arrived in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Instruction in itself not a source of material prosperity-False conclusions as to the condition of public teaching in a country in regard to political power-Primary teaching in BelgiumIn Prussia-The organization of primary instruction and the Reformation.

FTER an endeavour to prove that the Reformation is more favourable than Catholicism to the development of nations, M. de Laveleye sets himself the task of finding out the causes of this imaginary fact. The first cause is supposed to be instruction, which in his opinion is more complete in Protestant than Catholic countries; by instruction he means the small amount of knowledge, both scientific and literary, that can be carried away from the elementary school.

Saxony, Denmark, and Sweden are said to occupy the first rank among nations, with populations almost entirely free from uneducated men, whilst France, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal stagnate in invincible ignorance.

Invincible ignorance, for though Catholic States may decree compulsory education, as Italy has done recently, or spend large sums for this purpose, like Belgium, they do not succeed in uprooting ignorance.

In England, where primary education is a little more complete than in Portugal, the apparent regularity of this syllogism is perverted, probably because the Anglican Church is amongst the Reformed Churches that which is most akin to the Church of Rome.

Holland might have been mentioned by the side of Great Britain.

In Switzerland we are told that the Latin but Protestant cantons of Neufchâtel, of Vaud, and of Geneva, are under this head on a par with the Teutonic cantons of Zurich and Berne, and superior to those of Ticino, Valais, and Lucerne.

The general cause of this extraordinary contrast is contained in the saying of Luther, "instruct the children." Protestants must all know how to read, since the reformed creed reposes upon a book, the

Bible, whilst with Catholics reading is the path that leads to heresy—in a word, the organization of primary instruction dates from the era of the Reformation.

Instruction being very favourable to the practice of political liberty, and to the production of riches, and Protestantism favouring as it does the diffusion of instruction, a manifest superiority is to be seen in Protestant States.

This chain of reasoning is contrary not only to reality, but even to the economical thesis of the writer, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of God."

Everyone is aware that riches, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, are not the general portion of the learned and well informed.

Stultitiam patiuntur opes.

It is not riches, nor even science, but justice that educates nations.

Justitia elevat gentes.

In the most refined period of the republic at Athens, none of the electors contemporary with Aristophanes were able to read or write.

Primary education did not make the fortune of either Tyre or Carthage.

When ancient Rome governed the earth with her

political dictatorship, the fellow-countrymen of Ovid, of Horace, and of Virgil, were not all normalists. In the present day England is recognized as one of the first political societies of the modern world, and yet she is one of the lowest in the scale of primary instruction. Russia, the actual umpire of European peace, is in this matter the most behindhand of all.

The consul who reduced the country of Plato and Pindar into a Roman province was an uneducated boor. Many unlettered men could be numbered amongst those who carried the banner of the immortal principles of '89 through Europe.

The schoolmaster may have triumphed at Sedan, but who triumphed at Jena? Compulsory instruction existed in Prussia long before 1789, and it did not prevent that country from undergoing political humiliation from the retreat of Champagne, under the Prince of Coburg, until the year 1813.

From the reports of school statistics, the country which may be considered as most advanced with regard to elementary education is Sweden, whose civilized districts are more or less on a par with the provinces of Limburg, Luxembourg, and Namur, in Belgium.

In spite of the secular Schulzwang of Prussia, the