In Italy criminals are usually religious. Quite recently the Tozzi family of butchers, after having killed and dismembered a young man, sold his blood, mixed with sheep’s blood, in their shop, and went none the less to perform their devotions to the Madonna, and to kiss the statue of the Virgin. The Caruso band, Lombroso says, habitually placed sacred images in the caves and woods in which they lived, and burned candles before them. Verzeni, who strangled three women, was an assiduous frequenter of the church and the confessional, and he came of a family which was not only religious but bigoted. The companions of La Gala, who were imprisoned at Pisa, obstinately refused to take food on Friday during Lent, and when the keeper tried to persuade them to do so, they replied, “Do you think we have been excommunicated?” Masini, with his band, met three countrymen and among them a priest; he slowly sawed open the throat of one of them with an ill-sharpened knife, and then, with his hands still bloody, obliged the priest to give him the consecrated Host. Giovani Mio and Fontana went to confession before going out to commit a murder. A young Neapolitan parricide, covered with amulets, confessed to Lombroso that he had invoked the aid of the Madonna de la Chaîne in the accomplishment of his horrible crime. “And that she really helped me I conclude from this, that at the first blow of the stick my father fell dead, although I am myself personally weak.” Another murderer, a woman, before killing her husband, fell on her knees and prayed to the blessed Virgin to give her the strength to accomplish her crime. Still another announced his acceptance of a line of action devised by his companion in these words, “I will come, and I will do that with which God has inspired thee.”
[77] In Saxony, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Scotland (not England), illiteracy is at a minimum. Even in the most favoured Catholic countries, such as France and Belgium, at least a third of the population are illiterate. In this comparison race goes for nothing; Switzerland proves as much; purely Latin but also Protestant cantons Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva are on a level with the Germanic cantons of Zürich and Bern, and are superior to such as Tessin, Valais, and Lucerne.
[78] In Switzerland the cantons of Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva are strikingly in advance of Lucerne, Valais, and the forest cantons; they are not only superior in matters of education, but in matters of industry, of commerce, and of wealth; and their artistic and literary activity is greater. “In the United States,” says De Tocqueville, “the majority of the Catholics are poor.” In Canada the larger order of business interests, manufacturing, commerce, the principal shops in the cities, are in the hands of Protestants. M. Audiganne, in his studies on the labouring population in France, remarks on the superiority of the Protestants in respect to industry, and his testimony is the less suspicious because he does not attribute that superiority to Protestantism. “The majority of the labourers in Nîmes, notably the silk-weavers, are Catholics, while the captains of industry and of commerce, the capitalists in a word, belong to the Reformed religion.” “When a family has split into two branches, one of which has clung to the faith of its fathers, while the other has become Protestant, one almost always remarks in the former a progressive financial embarrassment, and in the other an increasing wealth.” “At Mazamet, the Elbœuf of the south of France, all the captains of industry with one exception are Protestants, while the great majority of the labourers are Catholics. And Catholic working men are, as a class, much less well educated than Protestant working men.” Before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes members of the Reformed church had taken the lead in all branches of labour, and the Catholics, who found themselves unable to maintain a competition with them, had the practice of a number of different industries in which the latter excelled forbidden them by a series of edicts beginning with the year 1662. After their expulsion from France the Huguenots carried into England, into Prussia, into Holland, their spirit of enterprise and of economy; and enriched the districts in which they settled. The Germans owe some portion of their progress to Huguenot exiles. Refugees from the Revocation introduced different industries into England, among others the silk industry; and it was certain disciples of Calvin who civilized Scotland. (See M. de Laveleye De l’avenir des peuples catholiques.)
[79] “Public institutions are still deeply impregnated with Christianity. Congress, the State legislatures, the navy, the army, the prisons, are all supplied with chaplains; the Bible is still read in a large number of schools. The invocation of God is generally obligatory in an oath in a court of law, and even in an oath of office. In Pennsylvania the Constitution requires that every public employee shall believe in God, and in a future state of reward and punishments. The Constitution of Maryland awards liberty of conscience to deists only. The laws against blasphemy have never been formally abrogated. In certain States, more or less stringent Sunday laws are enforced. In 1880 a court declined to recognize, even as a moral obligation, a debt contracted on Sunday, and a traveller, injured in a railway accident, was refused damages on the ground that he was travelling on the Lord’s Day. And, finally, church property and funds are in a considerable degree exempt from taxation.” (M. Goblet d’Alviella, Évolution religieuse, p. 233.)
Similarly, in Switzerland, in the month of February, 1886, the criminal court of Glaris, the chief place in a canton of 7000 inhabitants, at 130 kilometers from Bern, rendered a singular judgment. A mason named Jacques Schiesser, who was obliged to work in water of an excessively low temperature, shivering with cold, his hands blue, made a movement of impatience at the cold, and uttered irreverential words toward God. A procès-verbal was made out against him. He appeared before the judges, who condemned him for blasphemy to two days’ imprisonment. It is surprising to see Switzerland carried, actually by Protestantism, back to the Middle Ages.
[80] “By means of the confessional,” says M. de Laveleye, the “priest holds the sovereign, the magistrates, and the electors, and through the electors the legislative chamber, in his power; so long as the priest presides over the sacraments, the separation of Church and State is only a dangerous illusion. The absolute submission of the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy to a single will, the celibacy of the clergy, and the multiplication of monastic orders, constitute a danger in Catholic countries of which Protestant countries know nothing.”
[81] Would it not be possible at once to raise the income of all priests who are possessed of certain lay diplomas such as those of bachelor, licentiate, etc., and who, by that very fact, would be plainly competent to conduct a lay or religious education in a more modern and scientific spirit?
[82] M. Goblet d’Alviella.
[83] “Lay education,” said Littré, “ought not to avoid dealing with anything which is essential; and what could be more essential in considering the moral government of society than the religions which have dominated or still dominate it?”
[84] By M. Maurice Vernes (approved by Littré, and later by M. Paul Bert).