A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.
II
One of the most mischievous prejudices of our day is the popular theory that the cure for all evils is to be sought in the intellectual education of the masses. Those nations, we are told by every declaimer, in which the education of the people is most universal, are the most moral, the richest, the strongest, the freest, and their prosperity rests upon the most solid and lasting foundation. Make ignorance a crime, teach all to read and write, and war will smooth its rugged front, armies will be disbanded, crime will disappear, and mankind will have found the secret of uninterrupted progress, the final outcome of which will surpass even our fondest dreams.
This fallacy, which has not even the merit of being plausible, is, of course, made to do service in M. de Laveleye’s pamphlet on the comparative bearing of Protestantism and Catholicism on the prosperity of nations.
“It is now universally admitted,” he informs us (p. 22), “that the diffusion of enlightenment is the first condition of progress.… The general spread of education is also indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty.… In short, education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”
He then goes on to declare that in this matter of popular education Protestant countries are far in advance of those that are Catholic; that this is necessarily so, since “the Reformed religion rests on a book—the Bible; the Protestant, therefore, must know how to read. Catholic worship, on the contrary, rests upon sacraments and certain practices—such as confession, Masses, sermons—which do not necessarily involve reading. It is, therefore, unnecessary to know how to read; indeed, it is dangerous, for it inevitably shakes the principle of passive obedience on which the whole Catholic edifice reposes: reading is the road that leads to heresy.”
We will first consider the theory, and then take up the facts.
“The diffusion of enlightenment is the first condition of progress. Education is indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty. Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”
Enlightenment is, of course, of the mind, and means the development, more or less perfect, of the intellectual faculties; and education, since it is here considered as synonymous with enlightenment, must be taken in this narrow sense.