The proportions of religious teachers to lay were set forth in another table, which showed that in the public schools there were men belonging to religious orders teaching in the public schools, for the period 1886-87, to the number of 3,544, and in private schools, for the same period, a total of 6,560; while of women belonging to religious orders there were simultaneously teaching a total of 13,265. In the next quinquennial period the men of the religious orders teaching in the public schools had dropped down to the number of 132, while in private schools they showed a total of 9,249 for the same period, as compared with 6,540 for the preceding five year term; and in the next one they had increased in the private schools to 968, while they had disappeared altogether from the public ones. The women belonging to religious orders who taught fell away by over 2,000 in the public schools during the same period, while they increased from a little over 24,000 in 1886-87 to over 30,000 in 1896-97 in the private schools.

These religious teachers have now been all swept out of the primary schools as well as out of the secondary ones. In the latter there was more than 50 per cent. of the total secondary school population. The total number given in the year before the separation was 62,000. Now, the question which the Commissioner's Report raises is, What has become of those thousands of scholars? Only about 20,000 are accounted for, as having been shifted from the religious schools to the public ones and to private secular institutions. Many of the former scholars have followed their teachers across the frontier into Belgium. In the opinion of M. Steeg, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, many of the former students in the secondary religious schools, on withdrawing from these institutions, have taken up their abode in boarding establishments of a semi-religious character, in Paris and several other large cities. Still, taking all these explanations into account, no satisfactory answer is forthcoming as to what has become of the enormous number of young men who had been forced out of both primary and secondary religious schools by the law of separation. At least 30,000 of these are still unaccounted for. The loss is not alone in scholars; the money loss to the Church has been enormous. The Commissioner's Report, on this subject, says: "Although the clerical schools derived no direct support from the government, they profited indirectly by the annual appropriations from the public treasury for Church purposes. The loss in this respect is naturally enormous, as is shown by the fact that whereas appropriations for public worship amounted in 1905 to 42,324,933 francs ($8,464,986), they were reduced for the year ending April 1, 1907, to 543,130 francs ($108,026). The clerical schools also had the use of properties belonging to the Church, the final disposition of which property is still an unsettled matter.

Here are nearly eight millions of francs swept away from the Church at one stroke! Whence is this huge sum to be recouped? How can the sorely-tried Church contrive to carry on the work which this money represented? These are questions so grave as to fill the mind with dismay when contemplating the future of the Church in France; and, moreover, when we remember that this loss is not for a single year, but is to be repeated year after year, unless in God's providence the persecuting regime be overturned and some more rational rule be established, it is impossible not to feel the terrible gravity of the position in which this so-called "law of separation" has placed the venerable and immemorial Church in the once great Catholic country which led its hosts of deliverers to the Holy Land.

We have seen how the infidel government has failed in its attempt to form an effective corps of teachers, for the same reason that it will fail in making the child a sort of State automatim by eliminating the part of the parent in the matter of the child's education. Its theory is, seemingly, that everything belongs to the State, including the Church; the individual has no voice in the decisions of the State; he has to surrender his will to the will of the State, or rather to such persons as M. Briand and M. Combes, and make no demur. The action of the teachers shows, however, that great men like these are not always inerrant in their calculations. Teachers are men like themselves, and will not submit, in a Republic where they are told they enjoy unbounded liberty, to be snuffed out and treated as chattels or dumb driven cattle. Parents will likewise demand that if their children be not taught the principles of religion, they shall at least be protected from the language of blasphemy and insult to religion. This determination was manifested quite recently in a couple of remarkable incidents. In one case M. Girodet, the father of a child in a communal school in the Dijon district, had complained to the school authorities that the language of a teacher was grossly immoral and atheistic, and the charge was confirmed by the action of the local newspapers in suppressing it on the ground of its indecency. The teacher had ridiculed the idea of religion and declared that there is no God- "the only God was a well-filled purse," was his declaration to a number of children. He also told them that the Germans had in the invasion of 1870 killed infants in their cradles, and declared that they were to be commended for such savagery because the French army is a band of ruffians. No notice of the father's protest having been vouchsafed, M. Girodet took legal proceedings claiming damages from the teacher, but the court refused redress, taking the extraordinary ground that the teacher's declarations amounted to nothing more serious than a matter of opinion! In a country like France, where patriotism stands on the plane of religion, so phlegmatic a view of a declaration almost amounting to treason is difficult of realization. However, M. Girodet persisted, and took the case from court to court, until he got the final appellate tribunal to declare his charges proved and to sentence the blasphemous teacher, not to dismissal or imprisonment, as he richly deserved, but to pay a fine of about forty dollars and costs.

A glaring contrast to the foregoing illustration was afforded by a case reported in the Gazette de Creil, an independent Republican journal. Both the cases, it should be mentioned, were translated for the Catholic Times, of London, and published in that able weekly. The French paper told how the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny at Senlis had opened a private school there, after their boarding school had been closed by the government, and had gathered a few pupils. This daring proceeding soon came to the ears of the government, who sent spies to Cluny to look after the bold Sisters. A short time afterward they were summoned before the Correctional Tribunal like common malefactors, and lined up along with such criminals in the courthouse. The Gazette sets forth the grounds of the indictment on which they were arraigned, in this order:

"(1) That they gave lessons in painting and advice as to manual labor to pupils of their former boarding school who applied to them; (2) that they organized an infants' school for children who were not of the school age; (3) that they established a labor bureau, the object of which was to provide work for young girls and women."

After a solemn deliberation on these high crimes and misdemeanors the terrible culprits were condemned by this remarkable tribunal, and were, we suppose, subjected to some form of punishment, although the Gazette omits to state what it was. We may safely assume, however, that it included the closing up of their dangerous school, as a measure of public safety.

While the wretched simulacrum of a government in France is waging this inglorious war on religion, and on women and children, the population continues to make war on the laws of nature and of God, in regard to marriage and the family. With deadly mathematical certainty a progressive diminution in the birth rate is working out the equation how long a time remains between the present decade and that which will witness the disappearance of the French as a people from the face of the earth. The spectacle of Nero fiddling while Rome burnt could not be more horribly incongruous than that of the Clemenceau government playing the part of unmanly cowards in warring on priests and nuns and children, in its present rabid fury. Within thirty years the male birth rate has declined from 430,000 a year to 395,000. This loss will work out like the law of compound interest, but in the inverse way, so that in a few decades hence the pace down the hill will be like that of what is called "galloping consumption." There is a dreadful inexorability in the rule which God has established in the natural order for the punishment of violations of the moral law. It works as remorselessly as the piston of the oscillating engine, and woe to the nation that of its own volition invites the action of the dread Nemesis. Its days are surely numbered, and "the Mede is at its gate and the Persian on its throne"-unless it repent and cease to challenge the vengeance of heaven by its misdeeds against God and man.

Philadelphia, Pa.

JOHN J. O'SHEA.

THE FIGHT FOR THE SCHOOLS IN ENGLAND AND SOME OF ITS LESSONS.

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ATHOLICS everywhere, but especially in English-speaking countries, should feel interested in the great fight for the control of the primary schools which has been carried on in England for the past six years; and some of the lessons to be gathered from it deserve to be treasured.

The immediate origin of this stout struggle may be traced to the education act passed by the Conservative government in the year 1902. The purpose of that act was to increase the efficiency of all schools by giving them more liberal grants from the rates and to subject them more than hitherto to local public control, without, however, interfering with the denominational character of such schools, as had heretofore been designated "voluntary" as distinguished from "board" schools. The act of 1902 was considered a boon, but not an unmixed blessing by English Catholics. It provided larger financial support for their schools, which, since the act of 1870, had received considerable "grants in aid," but nothing like a due propor

tion of public moneys compared with the "board" schools. But, on the other hand, the new act subjected the schools to a vast amount of local interference, which in many cases resulted in rather extravagant demands for improvements in buildings and equipments at the expense of the Catholic trustees. All the same, the relief to the financial burdens so long borne by Catholics in the maintenance of their schools was considerable. All the expense of the educational work of the schools was now to be defrayed, for Catholics as for others, out of the public funds.

The Irish members of Parliament voted for the bill of 1902 as amended by the Lords at the urgent request of the late Cardinal Vaughan, but against what many of them considered, and what events have since proved, their own better judgment. Thoughtful men among them foresaw that the illogical combination of public control and of religious tests for teachers would not hold in a country constituted as England is at the present day. The bill left the Nonconformists excluded from teaching in the numerous Church of England schools, and it placed their children in a position of inferiority in districts where there was only a Church school, wherein, it was said, the Nonconformist children were treated as "little heretics." One of the best equipped in educational matters among the Irish members-Mr. John Dillon prophesied that the act of 1902 would one day be swept away and replaced either by an entirely secular and Godless system, or else by a Protestant compromise, in which Catholics would have no part. The latter is just what has taken place, or, rather, been attempted in the bill by agreement, a compromise between Anglicans and Nonconformists, which would have left Catholics in a large measure out in the cold, and which all but passed into law a few weeks ago.

The Nonconformists set on foot a bitter and well directed campaign against the act of 1902. They adopted the tactics of passive resistance to the payment of rates in districts where the schools continued under Anglican control. Well-known leaders among them, such as Rev. Dr. Clifford, allowed some of their personal property to be sold at public auction rather than pay the rates. The great Anglican establishment kept slumbering on and smiled at what it considered the childish waywardness of its Nonconformist brethren. But the latter meant business; they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Nearly all the old board schools were already under their control; they had never spent any money themselves to erect or support distinctive schools of their own, and they now made a determined onslaught on the school citadels of the Anglican Church, so as to have a hand in the whole primary system of England. To add zest to their campaign, they raised the cry of