The Catholic World, Vol. 13, April to September, 1871

by Various

These, we grant, are unpopular truths, but they, nevertheless, are truths, which it is worse than idle to deny. Everybody sees it, feels it, but few have the courage to avow it in face of an intolerant and tyrannical public opinion. For ourselves, we believe the peasantry in old Catholic countries, two centuries ago, were better educated, although for the most part unable to read or write, than are the great body of the American people to-day. They had faith, they had morality, they had a sense of religion, they were instructed in the great principles and essential truths of the Gospel, were trained to be wise unto salvation, and they had the virtues without which wise, stable, and efficient government is impracticable. We hear it said, or rather read in the journals, that the superiority the Prussian troops have shown to the French is due to their superior education. We do not believe a word of it. We have seen no evidence that the French common soldiers are not as well educated and as intelligent as the Prussian. The superiority is due to the fact that the Prussian officers were better educated in their profession, were less overweening in their confidence of victory, and maintained better and severer discipline in their armies, than the French officers. The Northern armies in our recent civil war had no advantage in the superior education of the rank and file over the Southern armies, where both were equally well officered and commanded. The morale of an army is no doubt the great thing, but it does not depend on the ability of the common soldier to read, write, and cipher; it depends somewhat on his previous habits and pursuits—chiefly on the officers. Under the first Napoleon, the Prussians were not superior to the French, though as well educated. Good officers, with an able general at their head, can make an efficient army out of almost any materials.

It is not, therefore, for political or military reasons that we demand universal education, whether by the general government or under the state governments. We demand it, as far as practicable, for other and far higher reasons. We want it for a spiritual or religious end. We want our children to be educated as thoroughly as they can be, but in relation to the great purpose of their existence, so as to be fitted to gain the end for which God creates them. For the great mass of the people, the education needed is not secular education, which simply sharpens the intellect and generates pride and presumption, but moral and religious education, which trains up children in the way they should go, which teaches them to be honest and loyal, modest and unpretending, docile and respectful to their superiors, open and ingenuous, obedient and submissive to rightful authority, parental or conjugal, civil or ecclesiastical; to know and keep the commandments of God and the precepts of the church; and to place the salvation of the soul before all else in life. This sort of education can be given only by the church or under her direction and control; and as there is for us Catholics only one church, there is and can be no proper education for us not given by or under the direction and control of the Catholic Church.

But it is precisely education by the Catholic Church that Mr. Wilson and his party do not want, do not believe in, and wish to prevent us from having even for our own children. It is therefore they demand a system of universal and uniform compulsory education by the authority and under the direction of the general government, which shall effect and maintain the national unification proposed, by compelling all the children of the land to be trained in national schools, under Evangelical control and management. The end and aim of the New Departure, aside from certain business interests, is to suppress Catholic education, gradually extinguish Catholicity in the country, and to form one homogeneous American people after the New England Evangelical type. Of this there can be no reasonable doubt. The Evangelicals and their humanitarian allies, as all their organs show, are seriously alarmed at the growth of Catholicity in the United States. They supposed, at first, that the church could never take root in our Protestant soil, that she could not breathe the atmosphere of freedom and enlightenment, or thrive in a land of newspapers and free schools. They have been disappointed, and now see that they reckoned without their host, and that, if they really mean to prevent the American people from gradually becoming Catholic, they must change fundamentally the American form of government, suppress the freedom of religion hitherto enjoyed by Catholics, and take the training of all children and youth into their own hands. If they leave education to the wishes and judgment of parents, Catholic parents will bring up their children Catholics; if they leave it to the states separately, Catholics in several of them are already a powerful minority, daily increasing in strength and numbers, and will soon be strong enough to force the state legislatures to give them their proportion of the public schools supported at the public expense.

All this is clear enough. What, then, is to be done? Mr. Wilson, who is not remarkable for his reticence, tells us, if not with perfect frankness, yet frankly enough for all practical purposes. It is to follow out the tendency which has been so strengthened of late, and absorb the states in the Union, take away the independence of the state governments, and assume the control of education for the general government, already rendered practically the supreme national government;—then, by appealing to the popular sentiment in favor of education, and saying nothing of its quality, get Congress, which the Evangelicals, through the party in power, already control, to establish a system of compulsory education in national schools—and the work is done; for these schools will necessarily fall into Evangelical hands.

Such is what the distinguished Evangelical senator from Massachusetts calls a "New Departure," but which is really only carrying out a policy long since entered upon, and already more than half accomplished. While we are writing, Mr. Hoar, a representative in Congress from Massachusetts, has introduced into the House of Representatives a bill establishing a system of national education under the authority of the general government. Its fate is not yet known, but no doubt will be, before we go to press. The probabilities are that it will pass both Houses, and if it does, it will receive the signature of the President as a matter of course. The Evangelicals—under which name we include Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Baptists, and Methodists, etc.—all the denominations united in the Evangelical Alliance—constitute, with their political and philanthropic allies, the majority in Congress, and the measure is advocated apparently by the whole Evangelical press and by the larger and more influential republican journals of the country, as any number of excerpts from them now before us will satisfy any one who has the curiosity to read them. We did think of selecting and publishing the more striking and authoritative among them, but we have concluded to hold them in reserve, to be produced in case any one should be rash enough to question our general statement. There is a strong popular feeling in many parts of the country in favor of the measure, which is a pet measure also of the Evangelical ministers generally, who are sure to exert their powerful influence in its support, and we see no reason to doubt that the bill will pass.

But while we see ample cause for all citizens who are loyal to the system of government which Providence enabled our fathers to establish, and who wish to preserve it and the liberties it secures, to be vigilant and active, we see none for alarm. The bill, if it passes, will be manifestly unconstitutional, even counting the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as valid parts of the constitution; and there may be more difficulty in carrying it into effect than its framers anticipate. It is part and parcel of a New England policy, and New England is not omnipotent throughout the Union, nor very ardently loved; not all the members of the several evangelical denominations will, when they understand it, favor the revolution in the government Mr. Wilson would effect. There are in those denominations many men who belong not to the dominant party, and who will follow their political rather than their denominational affinities; also, there are in them a large number, we should hope, of honest men, who are not accustomed to act on the maxim, "the end justifies the means," loyal men and patriotic, who consider it no less disloyalty to seek to revolutionize our government against the states than against the Union, and who will give their votes and all their influence to preserve the fundamental principles and genius of our federative system of government, as left us by our fathers, and resist, if need be, to the death the disloyal policy of unification and education proposed by Mr. Wilson.

The Southern states are reconstructed and back now in their place in the Union, and will not be much longer represented by Northern adventurers, or men of little ability and less character, but very soon by genuine Southern men, who, while strictly loyal to the Union, will speak the genuine sentiments of the Southern people. The attempt to New-Englandize the Southern people has not succeeded, and will not succeed. When to the Southern people, who will never acquiesce in the policy of unification, we add the large number of people in the Northern states who from their political convictions and affinities, as well as from their conservative tendencies, will oppose consolidation, we may feel pretty sure that the policy Mr. Wilson presents as that of the Republican party will not be adopted, or if adopted will not be permitted to stand. As not wholly inexperienced in political matters, and looking at the present state of parties and temper of the nation, we should say that Mr. Wilson, as a party man, has committed a blunder, and that, if he has fancied that his New Departure is fitted to strengthen his party as a political party, and to give it a new lease of power, he has miscalculated. Nothing in our judgment would be more fatal to the continuance of his party in power than for it boldly and unequivocally to accept Mr. Wilson's programme. There is such a thing as reaction in human affairs, and reactions are sometimes very powerful.

The educational question ought not to present any serious difficulty, and would not if our Evangelicals and humanitarians did not wish to make education a means of preventing the growth of the church and unmaking the children of Catholics, as Catholics; or if they seriously and in good faith would accept the religious equality before the state which the constitution and laws, both of the Union and the several states, as yet recognize and protect. No matter what we claim for the Catholic Church in the theological order—we claim for her in the civil order in this country only equality with the sects, and for Catholics only equal rights with citizens who are not Catholics. We demand the freedom of conscience and the liberty of our church, which is our conscience, enjoyed by Evangelicals. This much the country in its constitution and laws has promised us, and this much it cannot deny us without breaking its faith pledged before the world.

As American citizens, we object to the assumption of the control of education, or of any action in regard to it, by the general government; for it has no constitutional right to meddle with it, and so far as civil government has any authority in relation to it, it is, under our system of government, the authority of the states severally, not of the states united. We deny, of course, as Catholics, the right of the civil government to educate, for education is a function of the spiritual society, as much so as preaching and the administration of the sacraments; but we do not deny to the state the right to establish and maintain public schools. The state, if it chooses, may even endow religion, or pay the ministers of religion a salary for their support; but its endowments of religion, when made, are made to God, are sacred, and under the sole control and management of the spiritual authority, and the state has no further function in regard to them but to protect the spirituality in the free and full possession and enjoyment of them. If it chooses to pay the ministers of religion a salary, as has been done in France and Spain, though accepted by the Catholic clergy only as a small indemnification for the goods of the church seized by revolutionary governments and appropriated to secular uses, it acquires thereby no rights over them or liberty to supervise their discharge of their spiritual functions. We do not deny the same or an equal right in regard to schools and school-teachers. It may found and endow schools and pay the teachers, but it cannot dictate or interfere with the education or discipline of the school. That would imply a union of church and state, or, rather, the subjection of the spiritual order to the secular, which the Catholic Church and the American system of government both alike repudiate.

It is said, however, that the state needs education for its own protection, and to promote the public good or the good of the community, both of which are legitimate ends of its institution. What the state needs in relation to its legitimate ends, or the ends for which it is instituted, it has the right to ordain and control. This is the argument by which all public education by the state is defended. But it involves an assumption which is not admissible. The state, having no religious or spiritual function, can give only secular education, and secular education is not enough for the state's own protection or its promotion of the public good. Purely secular education, or education divorced from religion, endangers the safety of the state and the peace and security of the community, instead of protecting and insuring them. It is not in the power of the state to give the education it needs for its own sake, or for the sake of secular society. The fact is, though statesmen, and especially politicians, are slow to learn it, and still slower to acknowledge it, the state, or secular society, does not and cannot suffice for itself, and is unable to discharge its own proper functions without the co-operation and aid of the spiritual society. Purely secular education creates no civic virtues, and instead of fitting unfits the people for the prompt and faithful discharge of their civic duties, as we may see in Young America, and indeed in the present active and ruling generation of the American people. Young America is impatient of restraint, regards father and mother as old-fogies, narrow-minded, behind the age, and disdains filial submission or obedience to them, has no respect for dignities, acknowledges no superior, mocks at law if he can escape the police, is conceited, proud, self-sufficient, indocile, heedless of the rights and interests of others—will be his own master, and follow his own instincts, passions, or headstrong will. Are these the characteristics of a people fitted to maintain a wise, well-ordered, stable, and beneficent republican government? Or can such a people be developed from such youngerlings? Yet with purely secular education, however far you carry it, experience proves that you can get nothing better.