But was parliament free to grant the provinces the liberty to decide the question solely in accord with what the majority might now or hereafter think expedient? On the one hand, it was vigorously contended that it was free, and that any attempt to limit the power of the province was uncalled for, was an attempt to petrify its laws, and to revive the coercion which Sir Wilfrid Laurier himself had denounced and defeated in 1896. The recognition of separate schools in the British North America Act, the critics continued, applied only to the four original provinces, and there was probably no power, and {242} certainly no legal obligation, to extend the principle to the West. On the other hand, it was argued that Section 93 of the British North America Act--introduced at the instance of the Protestant minority of Quebec, and designed to protect the interest of all minorities--morally and legally bound the whole Dominion; that the Manitoba Act of 1870 confirmed the principle that the Dominion could give a new province only such powers as the constitution provided, which meant control over education _subject to the minority's privilege_; and that parliament, by unanimously establishing separate schools in the North-West Territories in 1875, had still further bound its successors, or at least had shown how the Fathers of Confederation interpreted the constitution. To many, however, the abstract questions of separate schools and the constitution were less important than the practical question, What kind of schools were to be guaranteed by these bills? Sir Wilfrid Laurier declared that the school system to be continued was that actually in force in the North-West, which had been established under the clause respecting schools of the Dominion Act of 1875, which the present bills repeated word for word. {243} This system worked very satisfactorily. It gave Catholic and Protestant minorities the right to establish separate schools, and to pay taxes only for such schools. In all other respects the school system was uniform; there was only one department of education, one course of study, one set of books, one staff of inspectors. No religious teaching or religious emblems were permitted during school hours; only in the half-hour after the close of school might such teaching be provided. The separate schools were really national schools with the minimum of ecclesiastical control.