of this way of thinking in a speech by Combes delivered during a discussion of the budget of Public Worship, January 26, 1903: "At the present moment we look upon the moral ideas taught by the Church as necessary ideas. For my part I find it difficult to accept the idea of a society composed of philosophers like M. Allard,[1] whose primary education would have sufficiently guaranteed them against the perils and trials of life." Combes is not the kind of man to have ideas of his own; he reproduced an opinion current in his circle.
This declaration created a great commotion in the Chamber. All the deputies who prided themselves on their knowledge of philosophy took part in the debate; as Combes had referred to the superficial and narrow instruction of our primary schools, F. Buisson felt that as the leading pedagogue of the third Republic, he ought to protest: "The education that we give to the child of the people," he said, "is not a half education, it is the very flower and fruit of civilisation gathered during the centuries, from among many peoples, in the religions and legal systems of all ages and of all mankind." An ethic of this abstract kind must be entirely devoid of efficacy. I remember having read, in a manual by Paul Bert, that the fundamental principles of morality are based on the teachings of Zoroaster, and the Constitution of the year III. These do not seem to me the kind of principles
- ↑ This deputy had made a very anticlerical speech from which I quote this curious idea that "the Jewish religion was the most clerical of all religions, possessing the most sectarian and narrowest type of clericalism." A little before this he said, "I myself am not an anti-Semite, and only make one reproach to the Jews, that of having poisoned Aryan thought, so elevated and broad, with Hebraic monotheism." He demanded the introduction of the history of religions into the curriculum of the primary schools in order to ruin the authority of the Church. According to him the Socialist party saw in "the intellectual emancipation of the masses the necessary preface to the progress and social evolution of societies." Is it not rather the contrary which is true? Does not this speech prove that there is an anti-Semitism in free-thinking circles quite as narrow and badly informed as that of the clericals?
