“Intelligence is more generally diffused; people are slowly learning republican habits and adopting republican ideas; a monarchical hierarchy that fostered superstitions, that only allowed education in a certain direction, and which ‘gathered gear’ unto itself ‘by every wile,’ has been dethroned; agriculture now has the aid of the numerous laborers who were employed in the erection of large edifices for monks and nuns and religious exercises.” A subsequent communication on the state of public education furnishes a rather strange commentary on the above: “The present attempt at organizing a public-school system is, in my judgment, one of the most laudable acts of the present government, for which it should be entitled to credit, whether there be success or failure. My opinion is that there are too many obstacles to be overcome for the plan to be successful, and that the government is undertaking a grave experiment which is likely to create great dissatisfaction, and may result in revolution. But having driven out most of the priests and nuns, who were heretofore the instructors of the people, it seemed necessary the government should try to supply their place.” The same latitude of opinion and ill-concealed hostility to the Catholic Church, the same desire to take advantage of every trifling circumstance to misrepresent and malign the motives of her supporters, pervade the correspondence of our other representatives in South America, almost without exception. Thus Mr. Thomas Russell has no scruple in lauding the usurping government of Venezuela, which, in 1870, first imprisoned and then banished perpetually the Archbishop of Caracas and Venezuela, suppressed the seminaries, confiscated the property of the monasteries, and expelled the nuns. Still less has Mr. Rumsey Wing in assuring the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, in writing about an alleged desecration of a grave in Quito, that the news “of those outrages on the bodies of Protestants” “would create an intense feeling not only in my own country but throughout Europe”; while, having nothing else to send, we suppose, the same officious gentleman forwards to Washington copies of two decrees of Congress, one granting a tithe of the church revenues to his Holiness the Pope, and the other placing Ecuador under the protection of the Sacred Heart, “to show the intense Catholicism prevailing in this country.” Then Mr. C. A. Logan, some time of Chili, appears to have interested himself very much in local politics, and it is not difficult to discover upon which side his sympathy rests. In a despatch to Secretary Fish, November 2, 1874, he has the hardihood to charge the Archbishop of Santiago with bribing congressmen, pending the passage of a bill for the partial repeal of a penal law against the clergy. He writes: