Who would pretend that the Spartans were in war superior to the Athenians because they had a more perfect system of education and were more intelligent or had a truer religion? Or who would think of accounting in this way for the marvellous exploits of Attila with his Huns, of Zingis Khan with his Moguls, of Tamerlane with his Tartars, of Mahmood, Togrul-Beg, and Malek-Shah with their Turkish hordes?
In fact, it may be said, speaking largely and in general, that the history of war is that of the triumph of strong and ignorant races over those which have become cultivated, refined, and corrupt. The Romans learned from their conquered slaves letters and the vices of a more polished paganism. Barbarism is ever impending over the civilized world. The wild and rugged north is ever rushing down upon the soft and cultured south: the Scythian upon the Mede, the Persian, and the Egyptian; the Macedonian upon Greece, and then upon Asia and Africa; the Roman upon Carthage, and in turn falling before the men of the North—Goth, Vandal, Hun, Frank, and Gaul; the Mogul and the Tartar upon China and India; the Turk upon Southern Europe, Asia, and Africa; and to-day, like black clouds of destiny, the Russian hordes hang over the troubled governments of more educated Europe. Look at Italy during the middle ages—the focus of learning and the arts for all Christendom, and yet an easy prey for every barbarous adventurer; and in England the Briton yields to the Saxon, who in turn falls before the Norman. It would be truer to say that Prussia owes her military successes to the ignorance of her people, though they nearly all can read and write. Had she had to deal with intelligent, enlightened, and thinking populations, she could not have made the country a camp of soldiers.
The Prussian policy of “blood and iron” has been carried out, in defiance of the wishes of the people as expressed through their representatives, who were snubbed and scolded and sent back home as though they were a pack of schoolboys; yet the people looked on in stolid indifference, and allowed the tax to be levied after they had refused to grant it.
We will now follow M. de Laveleye a step farther.
“With regard to elementary instruction,” he says, “the Protestant states are incomparably more advanced than the Catholic. England alone is no more than on a level with the latter, probably because the Anglican Church, of all the reformed forms of worship, has most in common with the Church of Rome.”
If any one has good reason to praise education, and above all the education of the people, certainly we Catholics have. The Catholic Church created the people; she first preached the divine doctrine of the brotherhood and equality of all men before God, which has wrought and must continue to work upon society until all men shall be recognized as equals by the law. She drew around woman her magic circle; from the slave struck his fetters and bade him be a man; lifted to her bosom the child; baptized all humanity into the inviolable sacredness of Christ’s divinity; she appealed, and still appeals, from the tyranny of brute force and success, in the name of the eternal liberties of the soul, to God. Her martyrs were and are the martyrs of liberty; and if she were not to-day, all men would accept accomplished facts and bow before whatever succeeds.
The barbarians, who have developed into the civilized peoples of Europe, despised learning as they contemned labor. War was their business. The knight signed his name with his sword, in blood; the pen, like the spade, was made for servile hands. To destroy this ignorant, idle life of pillage and feud, the church organized an army, unlike any the world had ever seen, unlike any it will ever see outside her pale—an army of monks, who, with faith in Christ and the higher life, believed in knowledge and in work. They became the cultivators of the mind and soil of Europe.
“The praise,” says Hallam, speaking of the middle ages, “of having originally established schools belongs to some bishops and abbots of the VIth century.”
Ireland is converted and at once becomes a kind of university for all Europe. In England the episcopal sees became centres of learning. Wherever a cathedral was built a school with a library grew up under its shadow. Pope Eugenius II., in a council held in Rome in 826, ordered that schools should be established throughout Christendom at cathedral and parochial churches and other suitable places. The Council of Mayence, in 813, admonishes parents that they are in duty bound to send their children to school. The Synod of Orleans, in 800, enjoins the erection in towns and villages of schools for elementary instruction, and adds that no remuneration shall be received except such as the parents voluntarily offer. The Third General Council of Lateran, in 1179, commanded that in all cathedral churches a fund should be set aside for the foundation and support of schools for the poor. Free schools were thus first established by the Catholic Church. The monasteries were the libraries where the arts and letters of a civilization that had perished were carefully treasured up for the rekindling of a brighter and better day.
As early as the XIIth century many of the universities of Europe were fully organized. Italy took the lead, with universities at Rome Bologna, Padua, Naples, Pavia, and Perugia—the sources