320 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
bodies.” The conscience clause dates back from the Prussian 
code of 1794, which lays down that “ admittance into the public 
schools shall not be refused to any one on the ground of diversity 
of religious confession. Children whom the laws of the State 
allow to be brought up in any other religion than that which is 
being taught in the public school, cannot be compelled to attend 
the religious instruction given in the same.” This order, however, 
except in the numerically insignificant case of the Dissenters, appears 
seldom to have been put in force. Mixed schools, where teachers 
of different confessions are associated together, have been tried 
occasionally, but have not been found successful. It has long been 
an established maxim in Prussia, that all schools must be denomi- 
national, and, as a rule, every child appears to find him or herself 
at a school belonging to his or her religious denomination. 
The obstacles in the way of legislating for the instruction of the 
people in this country arise in limine from differences of opinion 
as to the questions of religious teaching, school management, 
rating, and compulsory attendance. The obstacles in the way of 
educational legislation in Prussia arise from differences of opinion 
as to the relation of Church and State to local communities. But 
in Prussia the difficulty is only about altering the character of a 
system. The system is there, and is complete enough in itself. 
The only question is, Could not a better and freer system be intro- 
duced? We have seen how the Prussian people, following the 
advice of Luther, adopted universal school attendance as a national 
habit; how this habit was ratified and confirmed by law in the 
eighteenth century ; how the support of people’s schools was thrown 
on the householders by the code of 1794 ; and how, by common 
consent, and by law, the schools have remained denominational, 
with a conscience clause for the benefit of a very small section of 
the population. Thus has Prussia, in the march of time, quietly 
stepped over all those preliminary and merely parliamentary 
difficulties, which in this country have so long prevented large 
numbers of the people from getting any school education at all, 
while Lords and Commons have been wrangling as to the exact 
form under which the schools were to be started. 
But all this touches merely the external politics of public 
instruction. The question remains, What is the teaching in the 
