Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/312

 Catholics, would the community endure it. If not, let them do to others as they wished to be done by.

The appeal of the Catholics met a generous and almost universal support from the Press. They admitted that our complaint was a just one, and insisted that religious inequality should not be established in the colony. We followed up our success by getting a deputation of representative Catholics to wait on the Chief Secretary and the Attorney-General, who received us in the Chamber of the Executive Council. I pressed the principal points personally on our opponents, and Mr. Lalor, who was an habitual supporter of the Government, followed on the same side. It was suggested, as a compromise, that religious education might be given separately; but an American writer has said, with admirable truth, that you might as well give children the salt that ought to flavour their daily meals to eat by itself at a separate hour, as give them the religious teaching which ought to flavour their daily lessons in the same fashion. The future of this country mainly depended, not upon legislation or immigration, but upon the sort of men and women we were going to rear at home. Under these circumstances we submitted that the Government should either withdraw the Bill altogether, or amend it so as to make it apply only to those who are able and willing to combine of their own accord in the same system. Its destiny would not be determined in the Parliament House so much as in the schoolhouse; and statesmen throw away the most powerful of all influences for good when they reject the influence of early moral training. After three months' conflict we had a complete success. Mr. Higinbotham announced to Parliament that the Bill would be withdrawn. It was the most serious defeat he had met, and he was conquered but not converted. The controversy happily turned public attention on other important educational problems. I insisted that the existing system, and the one it had been proposed to substitute, had equally ignored questions of high import. The education which was finding favour in the best organised states in Europe, was not limited to the merely instrumental parts of knowledge, but was industrial, technological, and scientific. Count Von Moltke is said to have ascribed the success of the