Dr. ri;r:.ssF.NsÉ on mkn and tarties. 189 



plic'd païuplilct upon pamphlet, to denounce the foul conspiracy 

 for giviuL,^ secular instruction to girls, who ou;;ht, as he expresscfl 

 it, to be reared in the lap of the Church. His ciy of alarm was 

 heard. The edicts of his colleagues followed upon liis call, like 

 those pasteboard monks Avhieb go tumbling one over another, as 

 soon as 3'ou tip over the first in the row. Nothing can be drearier 

 than all this prelatical prose, that struts groaning along in its big 

 sleeves, with most elegiac lamentations. Unhapi)ily this melan- 

 choly literature generally relieves its insipid commonplaces with 

 now and then a denunciation, and calculates to make the lovers 

 of liberty pay the expense of its tears. It can't allord to cry for 

 nothing. 



Very soon the particular question widens out. It is not only 

 the instruction of girls which is on trial, but the whole sj'stem 

 of public instruction, both higher and lower. A vast movement 

 for petitioning the government has been organized, all along un- 

 der the impulse of the Bishop of Orleans, who has touched off the 

 train by his pamphlet on The Alarms of the Bishops, in which he 

 passes in review all the S3-mptoms of materialism which alarm 

 him m the instruction of our faculties. Only, b}- a strange inad- 

 vertence, he opens a petition for liberty of instruction, with a 

 demand that the State shall exercise its supervision and repres- 

 sion against such free associations a.>a are guilty of not suiting 

 him. This is the everlasting quibble of the Catholic party. 

 When it talks of liberty, we know that it means nobod^'^s liberty 

 but its own, and that it desires the suppression of other people's 

 liberty. The claw has pricked through the fur quite too often to 

 give us a moment's doubt over its liberal assurances. Have we 

 not seen how it has snatched the lirst opportunity to secure to its 

 own advantage a monopoly of public education ? "\Yc should be 

 perfectly agreed with it, if it frankly demanded entire liberty of 

 instruction in all its stages. "We are more and more convinced 

 that although the State ought to encourage to the utmost the 

 dissemination of learning, it docs not belong to it to do the teach- 

 ing; for the moment it begins to teach it has to have a doctrine, 

 philosophical, religious, or political, and then we have a Stat« 



