6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" But," interposes the optimist, " have the Americans not their 

 great public-school system, unrivaled in the world, to check and 

 finally to end the evils that appear thus far to be inseparably con- 

 nected with popular government? Is there any truth more firmly 

 established than that it is the bulwark of American institutions, 

 and that if we maintain it as it should be maintained they will be 

 able to weather any storm that may threaten?" Precisely the 

 same argument has been urged time out of mind in behalf of an 

 ecclesiastical system supported at the expense of the taxpayer. 

 Good men without number have believed, and have fought to main- 

 tain their belief, that only by the continuance of this form of ag- 

 gression could society be saved from corruption and barbarism. 

 Even in England to-day, where freedom and civilization have made 

 their most brilliant conquests, this absurd contention is made to 

 bolster up the rotten and tottering union of Church and state, and 

 to justify the seizure of the property of taxpayers to support a 

 particular form of ecclesiastical instruction. But no fact of his- 

 tory has received demonstrations more numerous and conclusive 

 than that such instruction, whether Protestant or Catholic, Bud- 

 dhist or Mohammedan, in the presence of the demoralizing forces 

 of militant activities, is as impotent as the revolutions of the prayer 

 wheel of a pious Hindu. To whatever country or people or age we 

 may turn, we find that the spirit of the warrior tramples the spirit 

 of the saint in the dust. Despite the lofty teachings of Socrates 

 and Plato, the Athenians degenerated until the name of the Greek 

 became synonymous with that of the blackest knave. With the no- 

 ble examples and precepts of the Stoics in constant view, the Romans 

 became beastlier than any beast. All through the middle ages and 

 down to the present century the armies of ecclesiastics, the vast 

 libraries of theology, and the myriads of homilies and prayers were 

 impotent to prevent the social degradation that inundated the 

 world with the outbreak of every great conflict. Take, for ex- 

 ample, a page from the history of Spain. At the time of Philip II, 

 who tried to make his people as rigid as monks, that country had 

 no rival in its fanatical devotion to the Church, or its slavish ob- 

 servance of the forms of religion. Yet its moral as well as its in- 

 tellectual and industrial life was sinking to the lowest level. Ofii- 

 cial corruption was rampant. The most shameless sexual laxity 

 pervaded all ranks. The name of Spanish women, who had " in 

 previous times been modest, almost austere and Oriental in 

 their deportment," became a byword and a reproach throughout 

 the world. " The ladies are naturally shameless," says Camille 

 Borghese, the Pope's delegate to Madrid in 1593, " and even in the 

 streets go up and address men unknown to them, looking upon it 



