convention, or a legislative body. Its function is not to make or unmake Christians, or predispose children to this or that form of religious faith. It does not propose a complete education; and does not propose a religious education at all, either partial or complete. It proposes to do a certain thing, on the ground of its necessity and utility to the State, and to stop there, by not entering that field which lies beyond the purview of civil government. In short, it proposes a secular education, and that only an education that would be needful and useful in this life, if there were no God and no future for the human soul.

This we believe to be the true ground on which to place a school system organized and conducted by the authority of an American State. It is the proper language of the State to the Catholic, and just as proper to the Protestant, the Jew, or the Infidel. It is the one answer to be given to everybody who asks the State to use its school system for any other purpose than that of secular education. To all such claimants and all such petitioners the State should turn a deaf ear, and confine its system of education within the limits of the ends for which it exists as a State. They should all be practically taught that the State will protect them in the exercise of their religious liberty, and will not on the subject of religion extend its agency the breadth of a hair beyond this point.

The general argument on which this doctrine

rests will be presented in its proper place. Yet it may be well here to say that the objections to the doctrine urged by those who dissent from it, when traced to their final application, are simply objections to the system of government which the American people have chosen to adopt and under which they are now living. The objectors, in effect, find fault with the theory of a State that has no religious creed to teach, support, or enforce. Their argument, if good at all, is good to rehabilitate the machinery and prerogatives of a state religion. They really object to the American doctrine of a State. We do not; but heartily accept it as true, being willing, without qualification or reservation, to extend it to all its legitimate applications. As a Protestant and a Presbyterian, we have no objection to the reading of King James's version of the Sacred Scriptures in the public schools, and should have none to the teaching of the "Shorter Catechism" there, regarding it as a most excellent compendium of Christian doctrine; yet, as an American citizen, taxed in common with all others for the support of these schools, we ask for no such tribute to our faith in distinction from the faith of the Catholic or the Rationalist, and concede no such claim to any religious sect or creed.

The Supreme Court of Maine, in the case of Donohue vs. Richards (38 Maine Reports, p. 401), expressly rejected the idea that Christianity, before the law, is entitled to any higher or other privileges

than those that are common to "the Pagan and the Mormon, the Brahmin and the Jew, the Swedenborgian and the Buddhist, the Catholic and the Quaker." This is simply carrying out the American theory of civil government by an impartial application of its principles. Those who are not willing that an American State should occupy this position either do not understand the theory of such a State or are not content to abide by its fundamental doctrine.

V.

SECULAR EDUCATION.

Bishop Butler remarks that "the constitution of human creatures, and, indeed, of all creatures that come under our notice, is such as that they are capable of naturally becoming qualified for states of life for which they were once wholly unqualified." This presents the fundamental law of human improvement. The first and for a considerable period the only form of its action we find in the nursery, where infant children gain that stock of information and those mental and physical aptitudes by which they become miniature men and women. Speedily they quit the nursery and enter upon the sterner and more methodical task of a higher culture. What meets them in the outset is common educa

tion, in distinction from academic, collegiate, literary, or professional. The great mass of them stop with this, and for their sphere it is sufficient. A common education is such as the average man needs for daily use in the average work of life. More would be no disadvantage to him; yet he has not time to obtain it, and also do the other things which must be done according to his programme of existence.

It is the specific function of the public school, organized and supported by the State, to meet these graduates from the nursery with the facilities for a common preparatory education before they become men and women, and, indeed, before they acquire those special arts the prosecution of which is to be the business of their after-lives. The public school is just what its name imports—a public school, a school to give a certain amount of education to all the children of the land that have reached and not exceeded the appropriate age. It does not support these children, or divorce them from home. government, or in any way supersede or disturb the regime of the family; but it does take the daily charge of their education during a certain number of allotted hours, and during these hours places them under the discipline and government of the school teacher. It thus comes to the aid of the family, and supplies what without it in a large number of cases would not be supplied at all.

The State, appreciating the importance of such

education to the general community, deems it a just and needful exercise of its power to devise a system for this purpose, to establish school-boards, to build school houses, to hire teachers, to adopt certain general rules in application to the subject, and charge the cost thereof to the people by compulsory taxation. Most of the States of this Union have such a system. The constitutions of some of the States make it the duty of their respective Legislatures to establish common schools, and in no state is the power denied to the Legislature thereof. The system is a State system; and, however much the General Government may be profited thereby, it has nothing to do with it and no control over it. Any interference with it or attempt to regulate it by the authority of Congress would be simply an act of legislative usurpation, because without any warrant in the Constitution of the United States. Whether the schools shall be what are called "mixed schools," or separate schools, in which different races shall be educated separately, is a matter for each State to determine in the exercise of its own discretion.

As to the quantity and quality of the education thus provided for, it is conceded on all hands that at the very least, it should embrace reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and grammar. These are the branches of knowledge which the people have most occasion to use. To them the State may, according to the scope of its policy, add other branches-as