n, in Holland as in most countries, is a
religious question, which in its turn is the most serious, indeed the only
great, question that now agitates the country.

Of the three and a half millions of inhabitants in Holland, a third, as I
have remarked, are Catholics, about a hundred thousand are Jews, and the
rest are Protestants. The Catholics, who chiefly inhabit the southern
provinces of Limbourg and Brabant, are not divided politically as they
are in other countries, but form one solid clerical legion,--Papists,
Ultramontanists, the most faithful legion of Rome, as the Dutch
themselves say--who buy the very straw that the pontiff is supposed to
sleep on, and who thunder Italy from the pulpit and the press. This
Catholic party, which would have no great strength of itself, gains a
certain advantage from the fact that the Protestants are divided into a
great many religious sects. There are orthodox Calvinists; Protestants
who believe in the revelation, but do not accept certain doctrines of the
Church; others who deny the divinity of Christ, without, however,
separating themselves from the Protestant Church; others, again, who
believe in God, but do not believe in any Church; others--and amongst
these are many of the cleverest men--who openly profess atheism. In
consequence of this state of things, the Catholic party has a natural
ally in the Calvinists, who as fervent believers and inflexible
conservers of the religion of their fathers, are much less widely
separated from the Catholics than from a large party of those of their
own co-religionists. These form, in a certain sense, the clerical wing of
Protestantism. Hence in the Netherlands there are Catholics and
Calvinists on one side, and on the other a liberal party, while between
the two there hovers a vacillating legion that does not allow either side
to gain an absolute supremacy. The chief point of contention between the
extreme sections is the question of primary instruction, and this reduces
itself, on the part of the Catholics and Calvinists, to insistence that
so-called mixed schools, in which no special religious instruction is
given (so that Catholics and Protestants of all doctrines may support
them), shall be superseded by others in which dogmatic instruction is to
be given, and that these shall be also supported by the commune under the
direction of the state. It is easy to foresee the grave consequences that
such a division in the popular educational s