odest sum in order that one of
the children now of an age to attend the school might be sent to it. The
two elder children settled the question by insisting that they would
give up their own daily ration of milk to meet the expense.

Will France be a nobler and stronger country when the priests who train
the children of her peasantry into this spirit are driven out of the
land?

This is the real question which must be met and answered by the
advocates of compulsory lay education in the public schools.

The next step to be taken in the 'laicisation' of the schools has been
already revealed in the famous 'Article 7' of M. Ferry. M. Ferry is the
true, though more or less occult, head of the present Administration in
France. 'M. Ferry,' said a caustic French Radical to me in Paris, 'ought
to be the mask of M. Carnot. Nature gave him a Carnival nose for that
purpose. Everything is topsy-turvy now in France, and so M. Carnot is
the mask of M. Ferry. But the nose will come through before long.'

Many years ago the public conscience of Philadelphia, then as now one of
the most Protestant of American Protestant cities, was scandalised by
the will of a French merchant, Stephen Girard; who, after acquiring a
large fortune in that city, left it to found a college, within the
precincts of which no minister of religion was, on any pretext whatever,
to be allowed to appear. The stupid bigotry of this ignorant millionaire
was the high-water mark of French Republican liberality during the
dismal orgie of the First Republic. It is still the high-water mark of
French Republican liberality under the Third Republic. The dream and
desire of M. Ferry and his friends are to prohibit ministers of religion
from taking any part whatever in the education of the French people.
Already the municipal council of Paris has undertaken to 'bowdlerise'
the literature of the world in order to prevent the minds of the young
from being perverted by coming into contact with the name of God. These
good butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers of the Seine really
believe, like certain more academical persons of higher social
pretensions in England and America, that the ineffable simpletons and
scoundrels who for three or four years during the last decade of the
last century made ducks and drakes at Paris of the public fortune and
the private rights of the French people, were inspired harbingers of a
new era. Outside of France it may be hard to suppose this