The governments that have ruled France for the past sixty years have in that period established more than 50,000 schools, and have trebled the appropriations for primary instruction.
As to the church, she is founded on two things: a book, the Gospel, and a divine command, to wit: Ite et docete, Go and teach. This sentence, which has become commonplace, “Ignorance is the source of all evils,” was uttered by a pope, and he added besides, “particularly among the working-classes.” These were the words of Benedict XIV., uttered more than a century before you were born.
The calumny is consequently shown to be dull-witted, and the nonsense still more so. It would seem that you also, M. Gambetta, hope, by means of schools, to stamp your effigy on future generations, just as if they were coin. But men versed in the subject know, and experience shows, that such a design is absurd, and may become a horrid tyranny. The instruction, whether primary or secondary, even with as much as you can add to it of the higher sciences, such as algebra, chemistry, etc., will not produce morals; and the parties who flatter the teachers expect, after all, much more from their influence on voters than from their action on their scholars.
Would you like to know what above all things, exerts an influence on the family and on society? It is education, whether it be moral or immoral, religious or atheistic. And do you know why I mistrust your reform? Because it will be neither a moral nor a religious one.
In sober truth, what sort of tuition is a really modern, a really democratic, one? Is there such a thing as modern geometry? a democratic grammar? moral teachings of recent growth, and a geography not yet published? All these big words are but windy oratory, empty and obscure, which affords no meaning to the mind when it attempts to analyze it.
Nevertheless, after having thrown off these sentences to your hearers, you go on and recite the mottoes of the party, the watchword of the day. It is a pity that you left out tithes and forced service under feudal law. You say tuition is to be free of cost—that is equivalent to adding thirty millions to our budget of expenditure; but what does that signify? You have managed to spend a large sum besides. The poor will pay for the rich; but the lower classes will delude themselves with the belief that they are not paying at all, and that they are indebted to you for the benefaction. Tuition is besides to be compulsory. Well, let it be so, if you can devise some adequate sanction for the contemplated enactments, a reliable protection for the liberty of families, and, in particular, a reliable guarantee for the teachers, so that you can feel sure enough of them to venture, without practising the most abominable of all tyranny, to compel parents to entrust to them, what they prize most in this world, their children. But then, minor details do not stop you. To conclude, the
tuition is to be by laymen—and now the cat is let out of the bag.
It is an easy matter to attack and calumniate absent priests, religious who make no defence. To do so is neither fair nor generous, but much popularity is to be got in that way in your party, and the hard flings at the church will offset the sweetness displayed toward other persons. So let us strike hard on this spot. The church is henceforward to be separated from the state—that is not enough, the church is besides to be separated from the school, and the school from all religion.
You have said, sir, that your republic would be a liberal one. If you accordingly begin by excluding from the common right to teach an entire class of citizens and of women, solely because their religious belief is not the same as yours, do not call yourself liberal, and do not charge the church with being intolerant, or else be logically consistent, and separate the state from the school. For the state, in this connection, means the budget; that is to say, the moneys which are got of all of us by taxation. You cannot, without being tyrannical, compel families to send their children to the school of the state. Lay aside these high-sounding phrases, and call things by their right names. By the church you mean us. By the state you mean yourself. To deprive us and our doctrines of our money, in order to bestow it on yourself and your doctrines—that is what is called separating the church from the state. But I feel pretty easy as to the choice families will make when I learn from you what the programme of this teaching is to be.
The programme is this: “It is an extensive and varied one, so that, instead of mutilated learning, man will have dealt out to him entire truth,