e Roman Catholic Clergy, who
virtually make a similar demand with regard to the children of
Catholics. The unreasonableness, as well as the ruinous effects of these
demands, is already palpable on our side of the Atlantic. If, when our
City was meditating the Croton Water Works, the Episcopal and Catholic
Priesthood had each insisted that those works should be consecrated by
their own Hierarchy and by none other, or, in default of this, we should
have no water-works at all, the case would be substantially parallel to
this. Or if there were in some city a hundred children, whose parents
were of diverse creeds, all blind with cataract, whom it was practicable
to cure altogether, but not separately, and these rival Priesthoods were
respectively to insist--"They shall be taught our Creed and Catechism,
and no other, while the operation is going on, or there shall be no
operation and no cure," that case would not be materially diverse from
this. In vain does the advocate of Light say to them, "Pray, let us give
the children the inestimable blessing of sight, and then _you_ may teach
your creed and catechism to all whom you can persuade to learn them,"
they will have the closed eyes opened according to Loyola or to Laud, or
not opened at all! Do they not provoke us to say that their insisting on
an impossible, a suicidal condition, is but a cloak, a blind, a fetch,
and that their real object is to keep the multitude in darkness? I am
thankful that we have few clergymen in America who manifest a spirit
akin to that which to this day deprives half the children of these
Kingdoms of any considerable school education whatever.

I think nothing unsusceptible of mathematical demonstration, can be
clearer than the imperative necessity of Universal Education, as a
matter simply of Public Economy. In these densely peopled islands, where
service is cheap, and where many persons qualified to teach are
maintaining a precarious struggle for subsistence, a system of General
Education need not cost half so much as in the United States, while
wealth is so concentrated that taxes bear less hardly here, in
proportion to their amount, than with us. Every dollar judiciously spent
on the education of poor children, would be more than saved in the
diminution of the annual cost of pauperism and crime, while the
intellectual and industrial capacity of the people would be vastly
increased by it. I do not see how even Clerical bigotry, formidable as
it