cotchman, in behalf of the Scottish people; and
as the belief seemed widely to exist that our own Free Church scheme
was adequate, or at least nearly so, to the education of the children
of our own membership, and that our duty as Scotchmen could be
fulfilled, somehow, by concentrating all our exertions upon _it_, it
had become essentially necessary that the delusion should be
dispelled. And so we have showed, that while our scheme, in order
fully to supply the educational wants of even our own people, would
require to exist in the proportion of _nine_, it exists nominally in
but the proportion of _six_, and in reality in but the proportion of
_four_,--seeing that the _six, i.e_. our existing staff of teachers,
amounting to but two-thirds of the number required, are but two-thirds
paid;--in short, that our educational speculation is exactly in the
circumstances of a railway company who, having engaged to cut a line
ninety miles in length, have succeeded in cutting forty miles of it at
their own proper expense, and then having cut twenty miles more on
_preference_ shares, find their further progress arrested by a lack of
funds. And so it became necessary to show that the existence and
circumstances of our Free Church schools, instead of furnishing, as
had been urged in several of our presbyteries, any argument _against_
the agitation of the general question, furnished, on the contrary, the
best possible of all arguments _for_ its agitation; and to show
further, that the policy which brought a denominational scheme, that
did not look beyond ourselves, into a great national engagement, in
the character of a privateer virtually on the side of the enemy, was a
most perilous policy, that exposed it to damaging broadsides, and
telling shot right between wind and water.

Let us now pass on to the consideration of a matter on which we
but touched before,--the perfect compatibility of a consistent
Voluntaryism with religious teaching in a school endowed by the
State, on the principle of Dr. Chalmers. The _Witness_ is as little
Voluntary now as it ever was. It seems but fair, however, that a
principle should be saddled with only the consequences that
legitimately arise from it; and that Voluntaryism should not be
exposed, in this contest, to a species of witchcraft, that first
caricatures it in an ill-modelled image, and then sticks the ugly
thing over with pins.

The revenues of the State-endowed schools of this country--and, w