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the garb of principles really foreign to it. Where this distortion of supervision is practised, it would seem that Catholic boys must be supposed to come to school so degraded and brutalised, so far inferior in rectitude and purity to their Protestant fellows, that they must be treated as meditating the worst kind of evil at every hour of the day, and, we must add, of the night. Where this system is in vogue, boys are literally at all hours and in all places under the eye of a master, jaded and worn down by the perpetual monotony of his duties.' That master despite himself, is a warder and not a companion. He is on duty to detect and punish, not to encourage and give help."

"We were not expected to walk about in couples in conversation. If talking in couples was at all persisted in, the parties were liable to arbitrary separation on the part of the Prefects. There is a special There is a special fear of particular friendships' in the schools of which I am speaking. This fear amounts almost to a superstition, and is of obvious foreign origin.

"No boy was allowed to lay his hand on a companion. I do not mean to engage in a fight, but to wrestle or to play. The fear of 'romping' was hardly less intense than the fear of particular friendships.' Any kind of demonstration of affection was regarded with marked suspicion, with the inevitable result of putting a premium on adventure in this respect. Stonyhurst boys would not have liked to be seen shaking hands with one another. To walk arm-in-arm would not have been permitted. In all these matters we were surrounded by a close atmosphere of suspicion."

We forbear to quote another passage from page 31, for reasons

which readers of the pamphlet can appreciate for themselves.

Supper over, there was recreation till about 8.30, at which hour we marched to the chapel for night prayers, the passage from the playroom to the chapel being sentinelled as usual. The last sentinel was the Spiritual Father, who was posted outside the chapel door. He said the prayers, which lasted about a quarter of an hour. From the chapel we proceeded to the dormitory, which in its several divisions was under the custody of the three Prefects. About fifteen minutes was allowed for undressing, and then the gas was turned out, and the day ended. We could not, as said above, wash before going to bed. There were no niences for washing in the dormitory. The dormitories consisted of a number of rooms, each holding, say, eight or ten beds, and opening into one another. The beds were divided by wooden partitions, with curtains in front forming small cubicles. The rule of silence was enforced in the dormitory with a jealousy of strictness which could not be exceeded. On no account whatever could one boy communicate with another."

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"When the gas was out, the Prefects remained on guard till presumably the boys were asleep. Then two of them retired, but, by turns, each one maintained the watch throughout the night, armed with a dark lantern. Often have I awoke at night and found myself in full light of this lantern. It had a strange effect, the person who held it was invisible. The light stopped a moment, and then flashed along noiselessly. Once or twice the bearer of the light, seeing me awake, has come into my cubicle and spoken a word to me, and I have discovered him to be the Prefect."

And now let us compare this

with Mr. Petre's own account of the Protestant system:

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"The life of a Protestant public school is for a boy eminently one of individuality and of freedom. The principles urged upon him in childhood are left much to their own growth, barring the support of a broad and distinct genius loci,' a strongly-outlined tradition. Added to this, he is not subjected to a minute personal discipline, a mechanical system of surveillance, or the enforced company of minds unsympathetic with his own. 'Bounds' are large; the choice of occupation over and above the regular school work is wide; opportunities for reading and for æsthetic cultivation, for leisure, for selection of companions, are numerous and largely under the control of each individual. A boy's virtue is in his own hands, and so far as can be expected without the grace of the sacraments, we feel bound to say that in the average instance the result on this latter head is ultimately satisfactory. If it were not so, we Englishmen should not be so famous as upright gentlemen, as lovers of truth, of justice, of moral purity."

Surely here is an instructive contrast.

The wonder is that young men brought up under the Stonyhurst system have any moral stamina at all. And, as Mr. Petre naïvely admits, the boys who are under this system of something more than convict discipline are remarkable for their pious use of confession and other 66 means grace." The net result is: either the means of grace" are sufficient,

66

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and the priestly masters and prefects are simply thwarting them (which seems to be Mr. Petre's own opinion); or else the "means of grace," even when most freely used, require the incessant presence of functionaries who are something between mouchards and prison warders. The inference either way is hardly complimentary to the Catholic faith. But, as sociologists, we are mainly concerned to observe, that this is the kind of thing Mr. Matthew Arnold wants to place under the wing of the State, and this is the kind of thing which the O'Conor Don, the Home Rulers, and Sir Charles Dilke want to endow with funds confiscated from the third university in the Empire. And such a policy is to be called Liberal!

No! The Liberal party has not been wrong in refusing to lend itself to any schemes for giving state recognition to such systems as these. If, as Mr. Arnold puts it, Liberals have hitherto deferred to the prejudices of middle class Puritanism, then, and in so far as it is so, they have given a wrong reason for their conduct. But their conduct has been right; and it has only been impolitic in so far as a wrong reason has been given. Irish Catholic Liberals (there are not many of them, as has been already pointed out) might naturally be alienated by conduct showing hatred and contempt of their religion. But when a devout and loyal son of the Church, like Mr. Petre, describes Catholic education as he does, can Catholics blame Liberals for refusing to lend State support to such a system?

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was born and thus baptised, and the name evidencing the narrative has been repeated through six generations of daughters Brooke.

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