to meet this danger of unsectarian education by founding a rival and orthodox association. But for fifty years the schooling remained so primitive, and the proportion of illiterates remained so enormous, that at last the bishops were brushed aside and the Government was compelled to resume the work of the old Roman municipalities and Senate.
The motives of the reformers and statesmen who secured this advance were complex. Some of them were frankly anti-clerical and eager to undermine superstition: some of them were business-men who pleaded that a lettered worker was worth more to the State than an illiterate worker. The predominant feeling was, as it had been among the Stoic reformers at Rome, humanitarian. The gross ignorance of the mass of the people was a disgrace to civilisation and a source of brutality and crime: it was a human duty to educate. It was very widely recognised that this sentiment imposed on us a duty of developing the child’s character as well as its mind, but here the Churches were inflexible. Unblushingly asserting that they were the historic educators of Europe, they refused to relinquish their last hold on the school, and the State was compelled to accept the compromise of religious instruction in the public schools, as well as the endowment of sectarian schools. As to the third part of the ideal of education, the cultivation of the body, we may admit that science itself was not yet sufficiently advanced to demand it.
With the growth of democratic aspirations, the
