This is the most important and most gratifying feature in the experiment, and holds out the strongest encouragement to apply a similar system to England, where fewer obstacles to the amalgamation of all classes exist. We assert it, with sorrow, and with the fullest conviction of the truth, that, to the established church alone, is to be attributed this humiliating circumstance in our social condition. The bishops not only have refrained from introducing measures for the general education of the people, but they have, invariably, thrown obstacles in the way of any rational plan, by which the children of the two great parties in the country, churchmen and Protestant dissenters, can be educated at the same school. Though the dissenters form such a vast proportion of the population, no concessions are to be made to them. The masters must belong to the established church the established clergy must be the superintendents every part of the system, in fact, must be tinged with some of the peculiarities of the church, else the bishops, and their steady supporters, the high Tories, rise in a body against the plan."

The total number of day-schools, of all kinds, in England, is considered to be about 40,000; and the number of scholars about 1,400,000, being an average of 35 to each school. Taking the population at 14,000,000, there must be about 3,400,000 between the ages of five and fourteen. Hence, we have the enormous number of 2,000,000 of English children left without any provision whatever for their education; whilst only for 1,400,000 is even the semblance of education provided! But, this supply, limited as it is, is very unequally distributed, and is most sparingly sprinkled over those districts where it is most needed, namely, where large masses of people are congregated together. In the counties of Middlesex and Lancashire, for instance, education is provided for only about one in fifteen of the population, whereas the scholars remaining for the whole of the rest of England and Wales, would give an average of about one in ten of the whole people.

If we were to inquire, next, into the kind of education which is afforded to the portion of children who are fortunate enough to get even the name of instruction, we would find it to be, in general, of a very wretched description. Several of the statistical societies, as those of Manchester and Liverpool, have given some remarkable details, upon this subject. It may be sufficient, however, to quote the following sentences from an article in the 131st number of the Edinburgh Review. The writer thus de. scribes the sort of education which the English

supply:

The schools which exist everywhere, and to the number of so many thousands, give a meagre instruction to the vast body of children which they affect to teach. They neither profess to teach what they ought, nor to teach what they profess. Reading, writing, and a very little ciphering, is the whole amount of instruction which the great bulk of those seminaries pretend to teach-and with the most of them, even that is but a pretence. Almost all the children who frequent them can read a little; but the greater number cannot read so easily as to make it sure they will, when they leave school, continue to

read with ease; and if they do not, there needs no argument to prove that, unless in some cases of necessity, they will never read at all.-In the kind of instruction, and in the quality of the teachers England is far below all these countries in Europe, to say nothing of America, where proper attention is paid to the education of the people. In France, Switzerland, and Germany, there are schools everywhere formed for the training of teachers; and the poorest of the people are taught in the common schools-besides reading, writing, and arithmetic, geography, natural history, practical geometry, linear drawing and music. The latter are of special use; not only because drawing gives habits of correct observation, and is of positive advantage in many occupations: but because both drawing and music afford a source of harmless gratification, and turn the mind aside from the grosser enjoyment of sense. Until the schools which abound in England, and profess to teach near a million and a half of children, shall be able to convey instruction in these branches of learning, as well as in civil history and the more simple and important principles of political and moral science, we may talk of education, and by a courteous and complimentary form of speech, give that name to what occupies schools pretty generally scattered over the country, but the thing, or any semblance of the thing, is, indeed, far enough from us.'

Unfortunately, it was the policy of statesmen to keep the people in ignorance. As their principles were tyrannical, and their practices criminal, they wished the people to remain ignorant, in order that their own day of despotism and guilt might continue. In this, unfortunately, they were but too zealously supported by the great body of the parsons. The latter, at least, in the established church, being the creatures of the ruling authorities, in general set themselves in opposition to all who advocated the enlightenment of the people; and, when nothing else would do, they had the impious audacity to decry worldly learning, as being calculated to make men bad Christians and dangerous citizens. We have always had, no doubt, splendid exceptions; but no man will venture to deny, that the rule has been as we have stated. Why, they even set themselves against the Bible Societies, as if they dreaded any movement which might cause a ripple upon the dead sea of dull ignorance! Their opposition to Lancaster is notorious; and their conduct in Ireland, in opposing, from the spirit of faction, a system for extending education impartially to all, is a present evidence to their disgrace.

turally, awakened many of the people of Eng

The recent Canterbury business has, very na

English peasantry. The Tories generally labour land to a sense of the deplorable situation of the hard to prove that education is no preventive of crime. Unluckily, however, for their argument, it is found, that the vast majority of criminals are uneducated; and the mad fanatics of Kent bear against them in the same way. The Reporter of The Times, gives important information upon this point. Writing from the scene of "Sir William Courtenay's" performances, he says:

"I am informed, that three-fourths of the labourers cannot read or write, and that, of the

remainder, who can read, only a very small fraction, indeed, can write. The landlord of one of the public houses mentioned to me, as a proof of the correctness of that information, which I had derived from another source, that a coal club, i. e. a club for the purchase of coals, during the winter, by paying ld. a week, all the year round, was held at his house, and that he, as treasurer, signed for, at least, three-fourths of the mem

bers."

Very few of the elderly class of labourers can either read or write. The younger class, consisting of men between twenty and thirty, are a little, but not much, better off than their parents."

Mr. Snoulton, some of the men in whose employment were deluded by Courtenay, said :

:

"In proof of the deplorable ignorance of the people, I need only mention, that at present, it appears to me, that the sole cause of my men following the madman was, their belief in his divinity, and power of working miracles; they can neither read nor write."

We trust, that such facts as these may produce some effect in causing the legislature to turn its attention more decidedly to the subject of education. We hope, too, that it will not be content ed with merely providing the means of teaching people to read and write.-for reading and writing do not constitute information,-but that, in every part of the three kingdoms, the youth may be enabled to have access to schools such as those which, to our disgrace, Germany, France, &c., have set us the example of establishing. Belfast Whig.

EDUCATION.-INSANITY.

Ir is, our readers will say, a very curious juxtaposition, yet it is not that we are about to say, as was said of St. Paul, that too much learning made him mad.

One of the most insolent and most unfounded assertions of some of the modest gentlemen, who are filled with spurious pity for the delusion of Papists, is, that the Protestant religion, is now, and always has been, the friend of science, and that Popery has been allied to ignorance. Hence, the old and young boys who, in these states, are selected to make public orations, or to spout at college commencements, seldom allow an opportunity of the kind to pass without rounding off a few periods with the light shed by Luther, and the Reformation, the mariner's compass, gas, and the blowpipe; steam-engines and safety valves, have not yet been superadded to Doctor Faustus and the printing press. We could bear all this with Christian patience, and be sufficiently just to reciprocate the pity so generously bestowed, where it was neither needed nor desired; but when the Catholics are parcelled out into classes, and those ac

counted most happy and enlightened, who dwell amongst Protestants, and their literature, their civilization, and their freedom, are asserted to be in the direct ratio of their proximity to Protestantism, we get somewhat discontented and impatient; for we perceive a great deterioration of our powers of perception, and detect a wonderful delusion of our mind.

We have lived chiefly in the midst of Protestants, and can feel happy at knowing that several most respectable men and women of their persuasion, are amongst our most worthy and most intimate friends;but in good sooth, we never found that they were beings of a superior race, elevated midway between Papists and the heavenly intelligences. We found them to be like all other kinds of men and women, some with good clear heads, and some a little thick and muddy, just like Papists.

We also found that some of them had good information and others were just so

So.

If then the assertion to which we have alluded be true, our powers of perception are greatly at fault.

But moreover we have laboured under a great delusion, and what is worse, it is likely to continue. We do verily believe, perhaps it is only imagination, that the best-informed Catholics we ever met with, were men who lived at a great distance from Protestants, and who never had the advantages of their tuition, proximity, or example. We therefore were led to believe that it was possible to have learning, education, civilization, and liberty, though Protestantism had never existed, and that Catholics could uphold and preserve these, even though religion should have been left unaltered, and that persons may enjoy just as much civil liberty in San Marino, as in Hanover, or in Prussia, and that children could be as well and as universally educated in Austria, as they are in England.

Whilst we were thus ruminating, we cast our eyes upon an Irish paper which had been just brought from the post office, and they fell upon an article on education, which will be found upon our columns. We read it, and as we have been in England, and it corresponded with our recollections, or delusions if you will, we gave it insertion.

Continuing our train of thought, as soon as the devil of the office had carried off the extract, we felt often and how proudly some of our fanciful boys had pointed out the superiority of England. How great, how glorious, how learned, how wise, how free, how victorious, how happy were her people? Because, during two centuries and upwards she had flung away the "Romish

This, to be sure, is admirably sustained by the article from Belfast!!! We then recollected that some persons engaged in observations on the several countries of Europe, respecting their Hospitals, had given comparative views of those which have houses for the deranged-and that the largest number were not found in Catholic countries, and that especially under the head of religious and melancholy madness the disproportion was very great; so that in the Catholic countries it was exceedingly small in comparison with others, and an Evangelical writer assigned as a cause, that with Protestants and especially with pious Protestants the subject was one of great importance, it occupied their thoughts deeply and intensely; with Catholics it was a subject of comparatively light concern, they cared little for it, and it seldom cracked

WE this day insert the addresses made by Bishop Hughes and the Very Rev. Dr. Power to an adjourned meeting of the Catholics of New York, on the subject of the recent decision of the city council respecting the right of the Catholics to a share of this fund. Both addresses are worthy of the orators; each is excellent in its kind. For our own parts, we were not disappointed by the result of the application to the council. Indeed we expected nothing else. We write deliberately when we state that, probably, there is not a town or city council in the United States that would not have decided in the same way. Do we then think the decision just? No. Do we think the council dishonest? That is not the ground of our opinion. What then is it? We do not think it likely that a public body can be

without its own consciousness or suspicion, think and act under the influence of great prejudice against Catholics, their claims, their rights, their principles, their religion, and their politics. Nor is it strange that such would be the case.

What are the influences under which the great bulk of our fellow-citizens have been educated? Those of English literature, which is calculated to vilify the Catholics, to whom the English nation was unjust and cruel, and whom it sought to vilify in order that it might save its own character from the imputations of injustice and of cruelty. Our fellow-citizens were educated under the influence of principles which are called liberal, and whose liberality consists in destroying all the distinctions between religious truth and religious error, of men who turned all the force of their ridicule against the Catholic Church for its efforts to preserve those distinctions.

They were educated under the influence of tyros in history, who imbibed all their knowledge from modern essayists and reviewers, and from garbled compilations; all employed or interested to misrepresent the events in which they whom Catholics respect were the heroes or the victims. Neither they nor their teachers were accustomed to view either Catholics or their religion as friendly to liberty, as lovers of learning, as promoters of industry, or as patrons of scicondescension to tolerate a Catholic in their ence. And hence they regarded it a mighty presence; it was a vast concession, to smile upon him with anything approaching to approval. We could easily amplify on this subject, but neither our space nor our time will permit us.

We may then ask, after their escape from school or from college, what was the religi ous influence under which our fellow-citizens were placed? Were they led to infidelity, the Catholic was the despised of the despised in their estimation! Did they get religion? The Catholic was the object of pity for his blindness, if not of execration for his connexion with anti-Christ and the beast. Thus, at this day, the Catholic stands in these republics as a Paria in the midst of the Bramins.

Nor is this all! The very harlots of the land have been hired, by the most popular teachers of religion, to write monstrous libels, or to lend their names to the reverend compilers of these edifying mirrors of modesty, that the best and the purest of the Catholic institutions should be accused of the foulest of crimes; and the very matrons of our country placed the filthy productions

in the hands of their daughters; and the very devotees of charity slid quietly into the schools of the children, to imbue their minds, noiselessly, with the contamination. Thus did the holy men who spoke in the name of God denounce Catholics as a pestilence; and they who were, and they who pretended to be, the lovers of our country and of its institutions, denounced them as the enemies of liberty; the aristocrat proclaimed their base servility, the democrat declaimed against their tyranny. The Catholics thus were made the raw-head and bloody bones of the nursery, the spectres of the schools, the scare-crows of the fields, the theme of the college undergraduates; and on the day of commencement they figured in the group with Luther, the Reformation, the mariner's compass, the printing press, and the blow-pipe: they were the execration of the godly, the abomination of the pious, the stump for the elevation of the political spouter, and the Jonas whom the political rogue cast overboard, to still the agitation which threatened his ruin.

He who has observed the features of our public character, for the last quarter of a century, will perceive in this hasty sketch nothing that is overcharged.

It is, therefore, that we said that the Catholic cannot expect justice from any public

body in this country, because every such body is more or less under the influence of that prejudice which we have so imperfectly described. What else can account for the injustice of Massachusetts, the bigotry of Boston, the criminality of its public courts of justice, the gross indecency of the very best and most fitting representative of Charlestown, and the absence of all sense of shame as well as of equity in her Legislature? Do we then despair?-God forbid!— No: we rejoice; and we feel now the influence of a reasonable hope, because the Catholics have been at length made sensible of their position; and before long their proper exertions will be directed to remedy the evils under which they have been so long overwhelmed.

They have tongues, they have pens: let them be used, not to vilify others, but to defend themselves; they have rights, let them be asserted. But it will require time, exertion, and patience. Let them be devoted as they should be, and truth and justice must be successful. Already the omens are favourable. Let the Catholics, and especially the Catholic young men, continue as they have begun in New York and elsewhere, and we shall have affection, and charity, and justice, succeeding to hatred, and bigotry, and oppression.

ONE of the most mischievous modes of assuming the appearance of a virtue which is not possessed, is pretty usual amongst a particular class of European governments: one or two specimens of the practice properly explained, will do more to give our readers a full view of the hypocritical impiety than any general description could effect. We shall take the new kingdom of the Netherlands as an example.

Formerly, that portion which was known by the name Flanders, was one of the most industrious, virtuous, peaceful, and contented sections of Europe. It was, we may say, altogether Catholic, and a more zealous, laborious, well-informed, and moral clergy was nowhere found than in Belgium. The education of this clergy was conducted principally in the diocesan seminaries, under the view of the bishop and his principal

clergy; and after many bequests had been made, and subscriptions given for the purpose of having those seminaries permanently and properly supported; and after they had been raised under the sanction of the laws, like our chartered seminaries, they were considered property consecrated under the guardianship of the government to the purposes for which it had been bestowed. Besides the seminaries for the education of the clergy, there were a vast number of elementary schools under the care of men who had devoted themselves to teach religion and literature, not for worldly recompense, but from the higher motives of doing service to their neighbours and to society, that for this disinterested charity they might through the merits of Christ be acceptable to their heavenly Father.

Not a complaint was heard ; all was peace,

harmony, and good will, education was diffused and universal. But, lo!-his Orange Majesty is advised that it would be better to establish one philosophical school at Brussels, than to have so many philosophical schools in the several diocesses: and he commands that for the promotion of literature, no student shall be admitted to a theology class until after he shall have spent three years in this college of Brussels: also, that the masters who teach in the different elementary schools shall be expelled to make room for a new race of teachers to be sent from model schools in Brussels. This wears a very beautiful appearance until it is closely examined. The true object is found to be under the pretext of promoting literature, to prevent any religious instruction. It was originally a plan of the infidel Joseph II., of Germany. But it has been resisted; and the liberal friends of education exclaim, "How the clergy are always opposed to science!"

It would be, indeed, a very arbitrary attempt of the Legislature of New Jersey, to declare that no young man should be admitted to study theology at Princeton, until after he should have graduated at Transylvania. But it would be still worse if the Congress were to seize upon the revenues of the Baptist college, in the federal district, and give them to the Jesuits of Georgetown. Our constitution would not authorize such plunder. The moneys collected by the several denominations are secured for their own purposes; and no person thinks of a possibility of plundering our seminaries for the benefit of literature. Not so, however, his Dutch Majesty. He has stripped the Episcopal seminaries of their property, in order to endow the Philosophical College, and seized upon the funds of the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, in order to bestow them upon teachers who are to unteach what they have taught, and to inform the children that the good people who left money for their education, were fools and fanatics.

66 BRUSSELS.

"The Brothers of the Christian Doctrine have lately been expelled from the diocess of Namur, and all the small Episcopal seminaries have been closed throughout the Low Countries and Holland. The whole of the Catholic clergy, consisting of the Prince Archbishop of Malines, the Bishop of Namur, the Grand Vicars of Ghent, of Tournay, and of Liege, the Vicar Apostolic of Boisle-Duc, and of Breda, the superior of the Dutch missions, the seven archpriests of the Northern Provinces, have addressed the king in strong, but respectful representa

tions, to which nothing more than short and insignificant answers have been returned. Many zealous clergymen had bought and endowed houses, in which they educate young men for the priesthood; these schools also, which were very numerous, have all been destroyed. The new philosophical college at Brussels is nearly completed, and will soon be opened for the reception of students.

"In the last report of the British and Foreign School Society, the committee congratulates itself upon the success of its labours in the Low Countries. Two large schools are in full activity at Brussels, and the king and the Prince of Orange are both declared to be favourable to the system of mutual instruction."

This last paragraph lets in much light upon the subject. Our good friends in England, having plundered the Catholic establishments of Great Britain and Ireland of what their pious ancestors had left for the purposes of religion and of literature, are training up some of the puppets of royalty, whom the unholy alliance of Europe has created to imitate their example. these are the men of liberality, the friends of literature and science! We defy France, Spain, or America to exhibit such proofs of attachment to virtue and knowledge, as to commit plunder for their sake.

Yet,

The following document cannot be well understood without a few previous remarks.

Cornelius Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, died in 1638, leaving after him an unpublished work upon the doctrine of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who died in 431:the object of this was to explain the doctrine of grace, predestination, free-will, &c. When the book was published, it was found to contain five propositions which did not accord with the doctrine of St. Augustine, which was that of the Catholic church. The book was of course condemned; but two questions arose-1st, whether Jansenius held this erroneous doctrine himself - 2d, whether this erroneous doctrine was really contained in his book. Upon the first question each individual was free to think as he pleased; the deceased could not now speak for himself, but he had left a codicil, declaring that he submitted all his writings to the judgment of the church. Thus it was at least charitable, if not just to say that he was not a heretic, though his works did contain erroneous doctrines. Respecting the second question, several persons who admitted the propositions to be erroneous, contended that in fact they were not in the work of Jansenius, and refused to subscribe the condemnation of the work, or to publish the papal