‘A cause that is doing much harm to the schools is, that everything connected with them is rapidly falling into the hands of the politicians. No party can now afford to forego an opportunity for strengthening itself by electing, or procuring the election, of party men as managers; and these again, for the same reasons, are guided in the selection of teachers by party considerations. It is coming to this, that no one who has to do with the management, supervision, or teaching of schools, will be the fittest person for what he has to do, except by accident.’ This gentleman had studied the subject of education, as well in England as in his own country, and he gave me some of the opinions he had formed on the religious part of the question, or rather as to how he conceived the proposal for secular schools would affect the Established Church, in the following words. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘the Church will lose nothing by the absence of a Church character in the schools. I never met with a clergyman in the old country, whether it was an archbishop or the incumbent of a small rural parish, to whom I put the question, who felt sure that the Church gained by the schools being in the hands of the clergy. No one will say that this attaches the children, when they are grown up, to the Church. For my own part, I feel sure that a system which would rigidly exclude both all Church and all denominational teaching would be a gain to the Church. This is necessarily true, if under the present system Church schools do less to indoctrinate those brought up in them with Churchism, than the denominational schools do to indoctrinate those brought up in them with dissent. My conclusion is, that if I were an English Churchman, I should not vote against the plan which would supplement your existing system with secular schools. It would do you no harm, and would give you many intelligent members.’ [Sidenote: _Canadians not yet a People._]