Who can for a moment affirm, that the aim of these Illiberals was in reality to give the people a good education irrespective of religion? Their aim was clearly that which we believe to be the real aim of their brethren among ourselves, who are clamouring for a secular system of education from which all ministers of all religions are to be excluded. Their aim was to deprive the children of the religion of their fathers, and substitute for it a new "Christianity" of their own. And we are convinced that the fire of their zeal in the cause of education would burn very low indeed, if it were not for the stimulating blast of their hatred against definite and dogmatic Christianity. They do not want so much to see the children of the poor educated, as to prevent them from receiving a religious education.

Hoc Ithacus velit, et magni mercentur Atridæ.

The pamphlet from which we have already quoted so largely contains some interesting quotations on two other very important points, which will no doubt be largely discussed whenever the attention of Parliament is called to the general question-the proposal to support schools. by local rates, and the suggested measure of "compulsory" education. With regard to the former of these two points, we find a strong opinion prevalent against the proposal. Local rates must be managed by local boards; and though at first sight there is so much to be said in favour of interesting people on the spot in popular education, we have too much fatal experience of the stinginess, the bigotry, the petty tyranny of local boards, elected by ratepayers, to make the proposal of such management at all palateable. If the education of our children is to be handed over to the same tender mercies which preside over the administration of the relief of the poor, or again, of local prisons, we have every reason to expect the most deplorable fate for the unfortunate victims of our legal philanthropy. Moreover, in a Protestant country, the lot of the children of the minority as to their religious instruction would be analogous to that of the Catholic inmates of the Westminster House of Correction. Local

boards can hardly be expected to be less bigoted than Middlesex magistrates, and they certainly cannot be more SO. But the objections to the proposed system which are urged by the Commissioners and the witnesses called by them are not rested, of course, upon the suffering which might ensue to a Catholic minority, but on broad and obvious considerations of experience. Speaking simply as Englishmen desirous of seeing the education of the poor of all denominations carried to as high a pitch of perfection as possible, we can conceive nothing more fatal to the prospect of such a consummation than the adoption of a plan which shall hand over the regulation of the school and the expenditure of the funds for its support to the small farmers, the shopkeepers, and the petty busy-bodies who come to the surface in vestry-meetings and assemblies of the same kind. If anything is simple obscurantism, this certainly is.

Again, as to compulsory education, this seems clearly enough never to succeed except under very peculiar circumstances, when the whole nation cares for education, and in such cases it is not wanted. This is the case in Prussia, and it would seem, nowhere else. The Prussian schools would be as crowded as they are without the law. With the evidence of this Commision before them, we defy our sanguine reformers to point to a single country where a law of compulsory education, vi suâ, secures the attendance of the children. Wherever it has been introduced it has first been largely mitigated by exceptions, and then the requirements of attendance have been cut down. In one Canton in Switzerland the school year lasts for nine months only, in another for only five. As Mr. Arnold tells us, in another "the obligation was perfectly illusory;" the making education compulsory "had not added one iota to its prosperity." "I was told," says the same gentleman, "that it was necessary to execute the law with the greatest tact and forbearance, but in plain truth I could not discover that it was really executed at all" (p. 47). Thus, where compulsion is required, because other motives will not avail to secure the attendance of the children, there it either fails altogether

It

or can only be applied to a degree extremely partial. must require a very vigilant and inquisitorial police to force poor parents to send their children to school, and the moment that the imposed obligation goes beyond the moral obligation of the parent-as must frequently be the case when there is urgent need of the child's labour-then such a law becomes tyrannical and unjust. Yet it would seem that the adjustment of such a law to each particular case must be a matter of the greatest difficulty. On the whole, we are not inclined to hope for much from the plans now suggested, if they go at all further than the prohibition of infant labour up to a certain age; and, as we have already said, whatever friendliness we are inclined to offer to the well-meaning advocates of such measures, is at once turned into the most determined hostility by their proclaimed resolution to make the schools at which attendance is to be enforced what they euphoniously call "unsectarian." The conclusion that forces itself on the mind of a careful student of the facts of the case must be, that much as it is the duty of the State to insist and facilitate education, and great as are the advantages which are to be gained when it discharges this duty adequately, there is still perhaps more to be feared from an excess of interference than even from apathy and neglect. This would be true even if a thoroughly fair system of denominational education were permanently established. We sincerely trust that in England, at least, we are safe from a change; but our adversaries are intensely active, and if they once succeed in their plans for mixed or simply secular schools, any measure which enforces attendance on these by legal enactments ought to be resisted by Catholics with as much resolution and tenacity as if it were an Act of Parliament ordering them to throw all their children into the fire as soon as they are born.

The Propagation and Prevention of Epidemics.

It is happily most unusual in modern times for epidemic diseases to rise to the importance of great natural tragedies, but, while these need the pen of a Thucydides, or a Defoe, to awaken the interest of the general reader, there are other reasons why at the present day all educated persons should give some attention to the subject. As long as the fatalist view prevailed, which was embodied in the maxim of the illustrious Sydenham, that God is the author of acute diseases, and we ourselves of chronic ones, men might be well excused for turning aside from so terrible an object, from which their only escape was flight. But science has so far justified the existence of these scourges of our race, as to prove that most of them originate in a violation of the primary laws of health, and that they might be greatly mitigated, if not entirely suppressed, by a very moderate amount of care.

We can better realise what a gain this would be, if we consider that the two common forms of continued fever alone-eminently preventible diseases-destroy, on an average, in London every year 2,500 lives, which are as needlessly sacrificed as if the victims had been wantonly hanged, or slain in the prosecution of some useless war. If once such facts are apprehended, every one will see that it is his duty to acquire some general knowledge of the subject, both for his own personal guidance, and, still more, in order to form a correct public opinion, to which only we can look for any improvement.

The first impetus to the study of contagious diseases in recent times was given by the invasion of Europe by cholera. It was commonly felt by physicians that the current theories of contagion were refuted by the progress and nature of that terrible disease, and a period of considerable hesitation and uncertainty ended in philosophical attempts to explain the spread and disappearance of epidemic diseases. About the same time, also, the line of criticism adopted by the French opponents of Broussais' system of medicine led them to prove that each of the acute contagious diseases, when carefully examined, was seen to be produced by the action of a special poison.

Taking together these principal points to be explained-on the one hand, the existence of a special poison, and on the other, its rapid diffusion from a limited centre, and its final diminution or extinction the only evident analogy in the rest of nature appeared to be the process of fermentation. One example will probably show this similarity. A very small quantity of yeast will continue to increase without limit, as long as it is supplied with sugar which it can convert into alcohol and carbonic acid, and only ceases to exist when no more sugar is supplied. In like manner, small-pox or scarlet fever is observed (under favourable circumstances, as in some isolated community) to attack every individual not protected, to increase indefinitely the contagious principle, and to die out only when all those susceptible of the disease have gone through it. There is likewise a parallel to the existence of a separate kind of poison for each disease in the various ferments which are known to exist, one of which produces only alcohol, another vinegar, another butyric acid, and so forth.* Nothing further was done to explain the intricate nature of the process, until M. Pasteur published his researches. Until that time, the changes produced by fermentation were looked upon, according to Liebig's theory, as owing to a movement propagated from the decomposing ferment to the body to be fermented. M. Pasteur first proved (what the French school of chemistry had long suspected) that fermentation was invariably accompanied by the growth and multiplication of microscopically-small living beings, which are different in kind in each variety of fermentation, all being "mycoderms," or moulds, with the exception of one, which is an infusorial animalcule. M. Pasteur teaches further, and most chemists follow him in this, that the spores or seeds of the ferment, falling into a suitable fluid, immediately begin to grow, and decompose the substance to be fermented by taking from it the oxygen which it requires for its own development. Fermentation, according to this view, is a particular instance of the general law according to which living bodies break up dead organised matter into simpler combinations.

This theory gave a new impulse to the microscopical examination of the various products of different contagious diseases, but as yet we have been destined to a series of disappointments. It has been repeatedly announced that the specific fungus, or animalcule, of this or that disease has been discovered, and further examination has always shown, either that it was no

The adjective "zymotic," applied, in the Registrar-General's returns and elsewhere, to all this class of disease, originated in this theory.