schools, and the
priests would enjoy an unlimited control over all the ignorant Catholics
of the country.

Under no circumstance should the Protestants of the nation allow the
Free Schools to be broken up. They are the foundation of the Republic,
and the bulwark of Protestantism and civilization. They undermine the
power of the priests, which rests on ignorance, while they leave
untouched whatever spiritual force the Roman Catholic Church may truly
have and deserve to have. The Protestants should sacrifice everything
reasonable and not vital, to retain these blessed agencies of
enlightenment.

We respect the sort of pluck of the Protestants, which looks upon the
giving-up of Bible-reading in the Schools as being "false to the flag."
But, in looking at the matter soberly, and without pugnacity, does
spiritual religion lose anything by giving up these exercises? We think
not. They are now of the coldest and most formal kind, and but little
listened to. We doubt if they ever affect strongly a single mind. The
religious education of each child is imparted in Sabbath Schools, in
Churches, or Mission Schools, and its own home.

The Free School under our system does not need any influence from the
Church. The American trusts to the separate sects to take care of the
religious interests of the children. We separate utterly Church and
State. There may be evils from this; but they are less than the danger
of destroying our system of popular education by the contests of rival
sects. We know how long every effort to secure popular education for
England has been wrecked on this rock of Sectarianism.

We behold the fearful harvest of evils which she is reaping from the
ignorance of the masses, especially induced by the oppositions of sects,
who preferred no education for the people to education without their own
dogmas.

We desire to avoid these calamities, and we can best do this by making
every reasonable concession to ignorance and prejudice.

Give us the Free Schools without Religion, rather than no Free Schools
at all!

CHAPTER XXXVI.

DECREASE OF JUVENILE CRIME IN NEW YORK.

THE COST OF PUNISHMENT AND PREVENTION.

Very few people have any just appreciation of the comparative cost of
punishment and prevention in the treatment of crime. The writer recalls
one out of many thousand instances in his experience, which strikingly
illustrates the contrast