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ing holic schools in the hope that their neighbors, the , would listen to reason and agree upon a plan by which allses of citizens might be secured in their rights. These hopeful people are losing hope. The ministers and the politicians will not permit the people to exercise their common sense and act in accordance with their natural impulses of justice and fair play.

To understand the amount of educational work accomplished by the Catholics of the United States, a few statistics will be useful. According to "Sadlier's Directory" for 1881, there were in Christian free schools, of a grade corresponding with the common or State schools, 423,383 children, whose education in State schools would have required $6,164,456.16, computing the cost at the average per scholar estimated by the Commissioner of Education for 1878,-a large annual saving in favor of nonCatholic tax-payers. New York State had 270 Christian free schools, attended by 80,429 pupils.

In New York City there are fifty-seven Catholic churches under the care of resident pastors. Of these parishes thirty-two have Christian free schools. Special reports for 1880 have been received from twenty-three of these parishes. They had an average attendance of 21,550 scholars. The great majority of the teachers were brothers and sisters of different religious orders. The amount paid for tuition alone was $100,928.16; for books, $8,638.93; for janitors, $8,397.00; for sundry expenses, coal, repairs, etc., $27,147.50. The estimated value of these twenty-three school-buildings, including ground and furniture, is placed at $1,501,300.00, omitting the cost of residences for teachers. As tax-payers in New York City pay for tuition at the rate of $20.30 for each child in its grammar and primary schools, they are saved $437,465.00 annually by these twenty-three Christian free schools. In a few years the parishes whose school-buildings are insufficient to receive all children whose spiritual care is on the conscience of the pastor, will have erected larger ones; and the other parishes not yet provided with these necessary school-churches for children, because of heavy indebtedness incurred in erecting expensive churches for parents, and because in some neighborhoods fine music is held of more account than the care of the young, will also have joined their sister parishes in a noble rivalry to work with whole-heartedness, as the Syllabus and the Church

teach, in gathering into Christian schools, from which the great thought of the life to come is not excluded, all the children of the flock. Priest and people who do not believe as the Church teaches have lost the faith. Priests and people who fail to live up to their faith because of heavy sacrifices to be made are unworthy of membership in a Church that demands of her disciples heroic sacrifices to preserve the faith. It is then only a question of time when there will be ample school room in every Catholic parish of New York City for all children having a right to a Christian education.

As the above figures refer to schools in the great metropolis, others, relating to a much smaller city and in the rural districts, may be of interest. In Rochester there are eleven parishes, ten of which have Christian schools. In these there was, in 1880, an average attendance of 4391 scholars. To teachers the amount paid was $14,152.39. As it cost the tax-payers of Rochester, in 1879, $117,387.57 to pay teachers for 8017 children, or at the rate of $14.64 per scholar, simple arithmetic tells us that the 4391 scholars in Christian free schools saved non-Catholic tax-payers $64,284.24 for teachers, not to speak of additional expenses for buildings, coal, repairs, etc. Catholic school-houses in Rochester are valued at $250,000. It is a costly price to pay for religion's sake, but it is well worth this, and more.'

We turn now to our non-Catholic friends, believers in Christianity, and ask, What have you done for the religious and moral education of your young? It is well known that educational establishments for the wealthier members of your flocks, in which religious and secular education are combined, are worthy of all praise, and bespeak the zeal of ministers and the liberality of laymen; but what have you accomplished for the poor children of your denomination, in view of the utter failure of the public schools? How have your congregations responded to the admonitions and entreaties of the General Assembly and the Protestant Episcopal Convention?

The weakest suggestion of a reform is the demand to replace the Bible in the public schools. The uselessness of the Bible as a mere reading-book was demonstrated long ago. As a teacher of morals and religion, it needed the living voice of a competent instructor to explain its meaning and enforce its authority and precepts, thus turning the school into a church. As a sign of antagonism to Catholics, it has ceased to play a part, for Catho

lics are no longer there to note the intended insult, or to heed the fumbling and crumpling of its pages by irreverent scholars. Bible-reading that teaches no dogma to children's minds is like trying to feed their bodies with dry husks. Theology without dogma may be adapted to the "Church of the Future," of which the agnostics are preparing to be the high-priests, but it is now an unknown quantity.

It is profound reverence for the Bible which induces Catholics to object to it in schools as an ordinary reading-book. Yet more do they object to its use in the hearing of their children when the teacher is one whose sympathies and belief are opposed to their faith. The school-master may never speak a word adverse to Catholic doctrine, and yet exercise a pernicious influence over the minds and hearts of Catholic children. The power of personality in the teacher is strongly placed before his hearers by the Rev. Dr. Hall, Presbyterian minister in New York City. In a Sunday sermon, he says: "You cannot detach absolutely the person of the teacher from the thing taught. One may ask, What can religion have to do with algebra? Now, if you could get teaching without personal influence, that might be true. But you cannot," etc. Earnest and devout Christians see that much of the growing contempt for the Sacred Scriptures is due to unwise and indiscriminate reading by young school-children, whose attention is called to passages suggestive of evil by perverted companions, or to its cold, hesitating, half-hearted, mechanical reading by skeptical masters. Personal influence is often more active and seductive on the play-ground than in the school-room. Catholics desire the exclusion of the Bible and of religion from schools to which, for the time being, they are compelled to send their children, in default of schools of their own. They grieve to see the exultation of secularists and infidels over the easy victory evangelicals have permitted them to win. The secularists, not Catholics, wave aloft the banner of triumph.

It will require a stronger argument than imputed lack of patriotism on the part of Catholics to re-introduce the Bible into the public schools, such as is offered by Bishop Coxe. This stale and decrepit calumny raises a blush on the cheeks of some, and flashes fire from the eyes of others. It may do for the hustings on voting day, but it is unworthy of attention from serious and just men, who know the historical record of Catholics on every battle-field from 1776 to 1865.

Such a cruel innuendo could be thrown out only by one who wrote of "Romanists": "Their arithmetic is wonderful, and their moral theology concerning oaths allows the widest exercise of imagination in making out returns and reports." The writer of this sentence would be barred as a juror in any court of Christendom, were this question on trial. The country is full of American Catholic citizens who smile at inane distinctions in their membership, kindly suggested by non-Catholic friends. These Catholics, so loyal and so true, may fearlessly challenge comparison with their maligners in all that proves devotedness and fidelity to the country and the constitution.

The taunt that when Catholics become the majority they will not tolerate others, may be relegated to the same category of popular claptrap good for electioneering times, but not to be flung out when men are seriously discussing how best to secure the stability of our common country. Should Catholics at any time, and in any part of the country, grow to be the majority, they will take delight in placing the minority on a footing of equality with themselves, even as the French Canadians, forty years ago, being then a large majority of the inhabitants of Lower Canada, settled this question of schools, in its moral and religious aspect, by conceding to the Protestant minority every privilege and claim asked for. It is an unfortunate suggestion to offer that to keep Catholics from practicing intolerance toward a Protestant minority, it is advisable for a Protestant majority to be intolerant toward a Catholic minority.

The belief is growing day by day that the public schools, as now constituted, are failures. Richard Grant White cries aloud only what is in many minds. It is distressing to be obliged to admit that the idol of our national worship is a false god; that education in earthly things, solely or primarily, does not make good citizens; that unbounded expenditures of money bring no adequate return; that the very principle of State pupilage is radically defective, and worse, is highly dangerous, fostering, as it does, the most cankerous social and political evil of the ageCommunism. It demands renewed efforts on the part of teachers and superintendents, paid officials of the schools, to keep the people from seeing these truths.

When the people of New York State were cajoled into the free-school system, with its denial of parental control, the prom

* "Moral Reforms," by A. Cleveland Coxe.

ise was held out to the anxious tax-payers that increased taxation for schools would be followed by lessened taxation for almshouses, prisons, and lunatic asylums. The former will cost less, so said partisans of the new system. Has the promise been kept? Our educated rogues are shrewder, and escape with greater facility from the meshes and restraints of the law, but our houses of correction are multiplying out of all proportion to increase of population; and lunatic asylums, State and county, cannot keep pace in number and accommodation with the demand made on them by victims of shattered brains and morals. The increase of crimes, not alone of crimes which send their perpetrators to jail, but of crimes which destroy the fountain of life, and the startlingly progressive multiplication of divorces destroying all hope of Christian families, the prop and mainstay of a republic, alarm ministers and laymen, and justify the verdict of "Failure." Schools that won sympathy on the plea of providing a plain education for plain people have spread out into high schools, academies, colleges, and universities. Normal schools give a professional training to young men and women who, for the most part, have no thought of following a teacher's career, for the compensation usually given is not commensurate with their expectations. Notwithstanding unlimited expenditures of public money, complaint is heard that instruction in the elementary branches of learning falls short of what the people have a right to expect, and "Failure" is written again.

But when in large cities, such as New York and Rochester, a third of the children turn from the open door of the public school, on conscientious grounds, and seek schooling in other buildings, put up and paid for by citizens the least able to open their slim purses to a second tax-gathering, it becomes a duty to proclaim the existing system a "failure," and a cruel wrong. The "failure" is the more evident when separate schools are needed for colored children, banned for the accident of color. It is yet more marked when the system requires poor schools, under the Children's Aid Society, to make room for those who suffer from the misfortune of poverty. But when a system of free schools, that seventy-five years ago began an assault on private and church schools for the alleged reason that there were some few children uncared for, and monopolized the teacher's work and profession by the power of the general treasury, to-day has to admit that there are adrift and untaught in the streets of one city from ten to twenty

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