e of Napoleon III, the Jesuits obtained the
guidance of nearly all the secondary colleges; Protestant
schools were sedulously discouraged, and nothing was taught
that could offend the mediaeval tastes of Rome. When, two
years ago, the French republicans had resolved to found a
free and compulsory system of instruction for all France as
the chief want of the nation, the papal bishops and priests
suppressed the measure by all their arts. They were resolved
to have no education which they could not control. The
republican movement failed; Bishop Dupanloup and his
associates succeeded once more in shutting out the light of
knowledge from the people, and have sown the fires of
warfare in the place of mental progress and moral culture.

"France, which has often made the most rapid progress toward
reform, has also been the most successful leader of modern
reaction. Its revolutions have set in motion all other
nations, but have failed to purify itself. It is enslaved by
a single church and ruled by Roman superstition. At the
recent assembly at Paris, of all the hierarchy of France, of
Jesuits, Dominicans, Monks and prelates, it was resolved that
all the strength of the papal party should be given to an
effort to grasp the control of the higher education of the
people, and make every college and seminary the teacher of
the worship of the Sacred Heart; to confine instruction
within the limits of Roman theology, and shut out more
strictly than ever before the light of modern progress. At a
great and powerful meeting of all the Roman Catholic editors
of France, a similar policy was resolved upon. By a strange
revulsion of sentiment the press was made to advocate its own
restriction or repression. The papal editors apparently sigh
for a return of the mediaeval practices when Francis I.
burned ardent printers in Paris, and the Sorbonne would have
banished the printing press from France forever. The Roman
Catholic papers invoke the restoration of the Bourbons and of
the temporal power of the Pope, and in the ardor of a new
spirit of martyrdom offered themselves up to a spiritual
bondage that must end in their own slow destruction and the
death of the national intellect They would enforce anew that
policy if isolation which has filled France with impurity,
and left it the prey of