populations composed, as here, of numerous religious bodies. It is an old adage that one fact is worth a dozen arguments. {128} We find that, after long years of earnest study of this difficult question, and after exhausting every half-way expedient, the statesmen of the countries we have named adopted with singular unanimity the views which we are presenting for the serious and candid consideration of the American public. We shall quote briefly from a few of those statesmen who are well-known leaders of opinion in the European Protestant world. Lord Derby: "Public education should be considered as inseparable from religion;" the contrary system is declared by him to be "the realization of a foolish and dangerous idea." Mr. Gladstone: "Every system which places religious education in the background is pernicious." Lord John Russell insisted that in the normal schools, which he proposed to have established, "religion should regulate the entire system of discipline." M. de Raumer: "They have acquired in Prussia a conviction, which becomes daily more settled, that the fitness of the primary school depends on its intimate union with the church." In 1854, he writes that "education should repose upon the basis of Christianity, the true support of the family, of the commune, and of the state." M. Guizot, the former very eminent Protestant prime minister of France, deserves to be specially quoted, although we are but repeating the extracts which we gave in another article. His words should be written in letters of gold. Let the enemies of religious education, if they can, present a satisfactory answer to this superb declaration: "In order to make popular education truly good and socially useful, it must be fundamentally religious. I do not simply mean by this, that religious instruction should hold its place in popular education, and that the practices of religion should enter into it; for a nation is not religiously educated by such petty and mechanical devices. It is necessary that national education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and that religious impressions and religious observances should penetrate into all its parts. Religion is not a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place, and a certain hour; it is a faith and a law, which ought to be felt everywhere, and which after this manner alone can exercise all its beneficial influence upon our minds and our lives." The first Napoleon, the restorer of order and religion in France, influenced, at the time, merely by human considerations, and speaking only as a wise lawgiver, and not as a practical Christian, insisted upon the necessity of making the precepts of religion the basis of education in the university, whose halls had echoed the blasphemous unbelief of the disciples of Voltaire.