rth-stone grow, not only moral
impulse, but true religion and all the patriotism that gives a love of
country, and stability and power to the State. Anything, then, that saps
the foundations of the household takes from under us the solid earth.
This, we maintain, is what our common-school system as now organized
and controlled is doing.

We trust our readers will be patient with us. We know that we are
touching on a tender subject. There is a religious feeling injected into
the craze that makes many men wild and unreasonable the moment the
system is criticised. We appreciate and partake of the sentiment born in
us through many generations of a struggle against the tyranny ever found
in a union of Church and State. Our blessed Saviour saw this when He
laid down that line of demarcation between the two when he said: "Render
to Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and to God the things that are
God's." We not only say that we are opposed to governmental interference
with religion, but we go a step farther, and, to make the line between
Church and State yet more distinct, we assert that government has
nothing to do with the morals of its people. Government is an expression
of justice, as seen and felt in restraining through punishment the overt
act of injustice. Morality and religion are so interwoven that they
cannot well be separated, and the man who claims the political machine
to be a great moral engine gives away all that our Christ commanded and
our patriotic fathers sought to establish in framing our Constitution.

We hold that the morality of a people, like their religion, may be
safely left to the Church and the home. When, therefore, the socialistic
belief that the child belongs to the State and not to the parent
prevails, not only the barriers but the very foundations of our social
and political existence are broken down and in a fair way to be
destroyed.

When we assert that the State rests upon the home, we say that which all
men save communists heartily indorse. Now, the home is founded mainly on
the mother's love. It is the strongest feeling given to animated life.
We share it with the brute. It is the law of our being, and the source
of all that is good. From the mother's care and training come our
physical and moral health. This is not sentiment, it is solid fact. It
is not that poets have sung and sages taught this great truth, but there
is not a reader of this who cannot trace back to his early home and