E.—REFORM.
The experience of the Middle Ages has made the separation of church and state the watchword of all true Liberals. But the divorce of church and school is a duty of hardly less urgent importance. While many of our best Freethinkers waste their time in hair-splitting metaphysics, Catholic and Protestant Jesuits coöperate for a purpose which they have shrewdly recognized as the main hope of obscurantism: The perversion of primary education by its re-subjection to the control of the clergy. The definite defeat of those intrigues should be considered the only permanent guarantee against the revival of spiritual feudalism. A perhaps less imminent, but hardly less serious, danger to the cause of Science is the stealthy revival of mysticism. Under all sorts of nomenclatural modifications, the specter-creed of the ancient Gnostics is again rearing its head, and menacing reason by an appeal to the hysterical and sensational proclivities of ignorance.
In the third place, there is no doubt that under the present circumstances of educational limitations the adoption of female suffrage would prove a death-blow to intellectual progress and re-doom mankind to the tutelage of a clerical Inquisition; but rather than perpetuate a twofold system of oppression, we should complete the work of emancipation by admitting [[95]]our sisters to all available social and educational advantages, as well as to the privilege of the polls. From the suffrage of educated women we have nothing to fear and much to hope.
It has long been a mooted question if the progress of knowledge can be promoted by arbitrary encouragement, such as prize offers and sinecures, but the preponderance of logic seems on the side of those who hold that science should be left to its normal rewards, and that the proper sphere of legislation does not extend beyond the duty of securing the full benefit of those rewards by the removal of absurd disabilities and unfair discriminations in support of worm-eaten dogmas. Reason may be safely left to fight its own battle, if the arms of Un-reason cease to be strengthened by statutes which enable every village ghost-monger to silence the exponents of science by an appeal to medieval heretic-laws.