sealed book, she will leave it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich, and will leave it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression, and will leave it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence.'

And now I have done. I know that it is for the old only to dream dreams and the young to see visions; but having dreamt my dream, I indulge for a moment in the privilege of the young; and while humbly acknowledging that there are many social problems to be solved, and that, as Machiavelli said, 'a free government, in order to maintain itself free, has need every day of some new provision in favour of liberty,' I think I see a vision of the glories to be accomplished in succeeding generations, and cherish a faith which is large in time, and that which shapes it to some perfect end.'

This fine old world of ours is but a child

Yet in its go-cart-Patience give it time

To learn its limbs-there is a hand that guides.

ALGERNON WEST.

MR. LAURIER AND MANITOBA

THE appointment by the Holy See of an Apostolic Commissioner to go to Canada, with instructions, if possible, to bring about some tolerable compromise between the representatives of the Catholic minority in Manitoba and the Government of the province, is but one of the signs which show that the problem which now for seven years has troubled the peace of the Dominion is not yet laid to rest. Mr. Laurier's Government finds itself in a singular position. The whole strength of the Catholic hierarchy of Quebec, the province in which the Catholics command a majority of over a million, was thrown into the scale in favour of the educational policy with which the Conservative party was identified; and not the less the Liberals triumphed all along the line, and in Catholic Quebec carried fifty seats out of sixty-five.

Many things combined to bring about this astonishing result. The wish to see a man of their own race and faith for the first time Prime Minister of Canada led French Canadians in troops to the poll to vote for the party led by Mr. Laurier. Then, too, Quebec is ever sensitive to any threat of encroachment by the Parliament of the Dominion upon the rights of a province. It is impossible for the Catholic province to forget that in all that concerns religion and nationality it stands alone in a sisterhood of seven. So seldom had the Federal Parliament sought to coerce a provincial Government, and was it for Catholic and isolated Quebec to encourage the exercise of a power which under other circumstances might so easily be turned against herself? Finally, and above all, Mr. Laurier, the leader they had trusted so long, had pledged himself to find a more excellent way than that of coercion by which to give back to the Catholics of Manitoba the rights of which they had been robbed. And so, in defiance of the most strenuous efforts of many of the bishops, Catholic Quebec joined hands with Protestant Ontario, and returned the Liberal party, for the first time for eighteen years, to power in Ottawa.

The first task of the new Government was to try to come to an amicable understanding with Manitoba, by which the Catholics of the province should receive back at least some of the privileges of which they had been deprived by the legislation of 1890. Unfortunately

the extreme bitterness with which the late contest had been fought made it difficult all at once to secure that perfect co-operation and understanding between the Catholic authorities and the Federal Government which in the conduct of such negotiations was so eminently desirable. Mr. Laurier and Mr. Greenway, the Prime Minister of Manitoba, quickly came to terms; but the settlement so arrived at, although at first proclaimed as final, was not of a kind which could be accepted by the Canadian bishops or ratified by Rome. Happily there is an earnest desire on all sides to lay this troublesome question to rest―a question which has already vexed the Dominion while a whole generation of children has been growing to manhood-and it is confidently anticipated that the mediation of the Apostolic Commissioner may be the means of bringing all parties together, and, while, perhaps, abating some of the extreme demands of certain wellmeaning partisans, may win for the minority in Manitoba terms in which they can honourably acquiesce.

To understand the merits of a quarrel which has stirred the religious and political passions of the people of Canada as nothing else in its whole history has done, it is necessary to examine the conditions out of which the dispute first arose. When Manitoba in 1870 passed from the position of a Crown territory, managed by the Hudson's Bay Company, into that of a province of Canada, its area, which is considerably greater than that of England and Wales, was peopled by about 12,000 persons, whites and half-breeds. In religion this population was about equally divided into Catholics and Protestants. Previous to the Union there was no State system of education. A number of elementary schools existed, but they owed their foundation entirely to voluntary effort, and were supported exclusively by private contributions, either in the form of fees paid by some of the parents or of funds supplied by the Churches. In every case these schools were conducted and managed on strictly denominational lines. When the Act of Union was passed it was sought to secure the continuance of this state of things, and to safeguard the rights of whichever Church should in the hereafter be in the minority by the following sub-sections in the 22nd section, which gave to the legislature of the province the power to make laws in relation to education :

(1) Nothing in any such law shall prejudicially affect any right or privilege with respect to denominational schools which any class of persons have by law or practice in the province at the Union.

(2) An appeal shall lie to the Governor-General in Council from any act or decision of the legislature of the province, or of any provincial authority, affecting any right or privilege of the Protestant or Roman Catholic minority of the Queen's subjects in relation to education.

Those two clauses of the Manitoba Act, 1870, govern the whole situation.

The attention of the new provincial legislature was at once directed to the condition of the elementary schools. The Government decided to supersede the old voluntary system by one of State-aided schools, which, however, were still to be scrupulously denominational in character. The legislature simply took the educational system as it found it and improved it by assistance from public funds. Thus it was arranged that the annual public grant for common school education was to be appropriated equally between the Protestant and the Catholic schools. Certain districts in which the population was mainly Catholic were to be considered Catholic school districts, and certain other districts where the population was mainly Protestant were to be considered Protestant school districts. The arrangement by which Catholic parents were to be held exempt from contribution to the support of Protestant schools, and vice versa, may be conveniently described in the words of the Judicial Committee in Brophy's case:

In case the father or guardian of a school child was a Protestant in a Catholic district, or vice versa, he might send the child to the school of the nearest district of the other section; and in case he contributed to the school the child attended a sum equal to what he would have been bound to pay if he had belonged to that district, he was exempt from payment to the school district in which he lived.

The only important amendment to this Act was passed in 1875, and provided that the legislative grant, instead of being divided between the Protestant and Catholic schools as heretofore, should in future be distributed in proportion to the number of children of school age in the Catholic and Protestant districts. Already immigration had begun to upset the balance of numbers and power, and as the years went on it became evident that the Catholics were destined to be in a permanent minority in Manitoba. This trend of immigration, which in 1875 made legislation necessary, has continued ever since; and to-day the Catholics of the province number only 20,000 out of a total population of 204,000.

No further change was made in the educational system of Manitoba until the memorable year of 1890. In that year the provincial legislature boldly broke all moorings with the past, and, abolishing the separate denominational schools, introduced a system of free compulsory and unsectarian schools, for the support of which the whole community was to be taxed. Henceforward State recognition and all public assistance were to be denied to the denominational schools; it was an educational revolution. The representatives of the minority, which thus found itself suddenly robbed of the rights which it had so carefully sought to safeguard and fence around in the Act of Union, at once took action. The simplest thing would have been to call upon the Federal Government to disallow the new legislation, as it had power to do any time within a year. But the memory of a recent conflict between Manitoba and the Parliament of Canada about a

new line which threatened the monopoly of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in which the Federal authorities had found it prudent to give way, induced Cardinal Taschereau and the Catholic hierarchy to petition the Governor-General in Council not to disallow the Act of 1890, but, in general terms, 'to afford a remedy to the pernicious legislation above mentioned, and that in the most efficacious and just way.' It would be unprofitable to discuss here whether the local conditions were such as in fact to justify the bishops in declining to ask expressly for the disallowance of the Act, and in trusting instead in a plea at large for relief. Certain it is that if the Government had taken the simple and straight course of disallowing the Act of 1890 the remedy would have been swift and effective, and Manitoba would have had no choice but to modify its legislation in a way which would have respected the privileges of the separate schools. In the event, the Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John Macdonald, decided to refer the question to the courts of justice, and a test case was begun. For the Catholics the issues were very clearly defined. Before the legislation of 1890 they had enjoyed their own separate schools, appointed their own teachers, arranged their own hours for religious instruction, and received their proportionate share of the public grant for elementary education. The Act of 1890 sent the Catholic minority into the wilderness as outcasts from the public educational system of the country; they might indeed still conduct their own schools, but these could receive no sixpence from the public purse, and the Catholic population was to be taxed for the benefit of the unsectarian schools their children could never use. To test the legality of the change, what is known as Barrett's case was begun in Winnipeg. It was carried to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the Canadian judges by a unanimous decision declared that the Act of 1890 was ultra vires and void. The city of Winnipeg appealed to the Privy Council, and that tribunal in July 1892 reversed the decision of the Canadian Court and affirmed that the Act was valid and binding. The Catholics had built their hopes upon the sub-section of section 22 of the Manitoba Act, 1870, which said no law passed by the provincial legislature should prejudicially affect any right or privilege with respect to denominational schools which any class of persons has by law or practice in the province at the Union.' It was obvious that most of the privileges of which the minority were deprived by the Act of 1890 had been acquired by post-Union legislation, and therefore could not be covered by this clause. After 1890, as before the Union, the minority were perfectly free, if they liked, to keep up their own schools at their own cost. Setting aside the happy period between the Union and 1890, the only difference between the position of the minority subsequently to 1890 and that which they held before 1870 was this, that while before the Union they had to keep up their own schools at their own expense, after 1890 they were