In view of the great influence that Catholicism still has on public life in Germany, through the Centre party, this change of front should be a great gain to education. Virchow demanded as late as 1877 that the dangerous doctrine of evolution should be excluded from the schools. The Ministers of Instruction of the two chief German States gratefully adopted this warning from the leader of the progressive party, forbade the teaching of Darwinian ideas, and made every effort to check the spread of biological knowledge. Now, twenty-five years afterwards, the Jesuits come forward, and demand the opposite. They recognise openly that the hated theory of evolution is established, and try to reconcile it with the creed! What an irony of history! And we find much the same story when we read the struggles for freedom of thought and for the recognition of evolution in the other educated countries of Europe. In Italy, its cradle and home, educated people generally look upon the papacy with the most profound disdain. I have spent many years in Italy, and have never met an educated Italian of such bigoted and narrow views as we usually find amongst educated German Catholics--represented with success in the Reichstag by the Centre party. It is proof enough of the reactionary character of German Catholics that the Pope himself describes them as his most vigorous soldiers, and points them out as models to the faithful of other nations. As the whole history of the Roman Church shows, the charlatan of the Vatican is the deadly enemy of free science and free teaching. The present German Emperor ought to regard it as his most sacred duty to maintain the tradition of the Reformation, and to promote the formation of the German people in the sense of Frederick the Great. Instead of this we have to look on with heavy hearts while the Emperor, badly advised and misled by those in influence about him, suffers himself to be caught closer and closer in the net of the Catholic clergy, and sacrifices to it the intelligence of the rising generation. In September, 1904, the Catholic journals announced triumphantly that the adoption of Catholicism by the Emperor and his Chancellor was close at hand.[5]