Even for this world, for civilization itself, the religious education which the church gives is far better than any so-called secular education without it. The church has not always been able to secure universal secular education for all her children; but there can be no question that the illiterate classes of Catholic nations are far more civilized and better trained than are the corresponding classes of Protestant nations. There is no comparison in personal dignity, manliness, self-respect, courtesy of manner, refined feeling, and delicate sentiment, between an unlettered Italian, French, Spanish, or Irish peasant, and an unlettered Protestant German, English, or American. The one is a cultivated, a civilized man; the other is a boor, a clown, coarse and brutal, who perpetually mistakes impudence for independence, and proves his self-respect by his indifference or insults to others. The difference is due to the difference of religion and religious culture; not, as is sometimes pretended, to difference of race. The church civilizes the whole nation that accepts her; only the upper classes in Protestant nations are civilized. Of course, we do not and can not expect, in a state where Protestants have equal rights with Catholics before the state, to carry our religion into public schools designed equally for all. We have no right to do it. But Protestants have no more right to carry their religion into them than we have to carry ours; and carry theirs they do, when ours is excluded. Their rights are equal to ours, and ours are equal to theirs; and neither does nor can, in the eyes of the state, override the other. As the question is a matter of conscience, and therefore of the rights of God, there can be no compromise, no splitting of differences, or yielding of the one party to the other. Here comes up the precise difficulty. The state is bound equally to recognize and respect the conscience of Protestants and of Catholics, and has no right to restrain the conscience of either. There must, then, be a dead-lock, unless some method can be discovered or devised by which the public schools can be saved without lesion either to the Protestant or the Catholic.