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 certainly the present enormously costly system would never have been attempted.

In the very next number of the periodical, in which Mr. Fairfield pleaded for the Roman Catholic claims, Sir Robert Stout, the late Premier of New Zealand, in an article entitled "Our Waifs and Strays," subjected the whole question to the crushing test of statistics. Sir Robert Stout, I may remark, is one of the very few prominent public men in Australasia who is an open disbeliever in Christianity. His article therefore should be perused with caution, as it is quite impossible, especially for a capable man, to take up so exceptional and so hostile an attitude against the bulk of his fellows, and not display an "anti-religious bias." Sir Robert Stout attempts to show by figures (1) that the churches that are loudest in denouncing secular education have the worst record; and (2) that "godless" schools have not produced so many wicked children as the sectarian seminaries. I do not question the accuracy of his statistics; but I draw a different inference from them. Mr. Hayter, the Government Statist of Victoria, has a very pithy way of summing up the vital statistics of that colony. From 1865 to 1876, he tells us, there