Ryerson then points out that in Upper Canada the education of the masses has been sacrificed to the education of a select class. He wishes to see a system of universal education adapted to the needs of the country. "The branches of knowledge which it is essential that all should understand should be provided for all, and taught to all; should be brought within the reach of the most needy and forced upon the attention of the most careless. The knowledge required for the scientific pursuit of mechanics, agriculture, and commerce must needs be provided to an extent corresponding with the demand and the exigencies of the country; while to a more limited extent are needed facilities for acquiring the higher education of the learned professions." The Report sets forth a great array of proof drawn from the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, and other European countries, to show that the productive capacity of the people, their morality and intelligence, are in direct proportion to their schools and institutions of learning. Ryerson lays down as fundamental that any system adopted for Upper Canada must be universal in the sense of giving elementary instruction to all and practical in the sense of fitting for the duties of life in a young country. He goes to considerable trouble to show that in his view the practical includes religion and morality, as well as a development of the merely intellectual powers. Ryerson was no narrow ecclesiastic, but still he could conceive of no sound system of elementary instruction that did not provide for the teaching of the essential truths of Christianity. He was decidedly not in favour of secular schools or secular colleges. And yet he believed that religious instruction in mixed classes was possible, and pointed out in his Report how it might be conducted. He made a very sharp distinction between religion and dogma, between the essential truths of Christianity and sectarianism. Dogma and sectarian teaching, in his opinion, had no place in schools except in those where all the pupils were of a common religious faith. What he pleads for in his Report is the recognition of Christianity as a basis of all instruction, and the teaching of as much of the Bible as could be given without offending any sectarian prejudices. "To teach a child the dogmas and spirit of a Sect, before he is taught the essential principles of Religion and Morality, is to invert the pyramid, to reverse the order of nature,--to feed with the bones of controversy instead of with the nourishing milk of Truth and Charity.... I can aver from personal experience and practice, as well as from a very extended enquiry on this subject, that a much more comprehensive course of Biblical and Religious instruction can be given than there is likely to be opportunity for doing so in Elementary Schools, without any restraint on the one side or any tincture of sectarianism on the other,--a course embracing the entire history of the