Into the larger question of the relation of religious education and crime I cannot enter here. I have shown elsewhere that France, Victoria, and New Zealand, the countries with longest experience of secular education, have the best record among civilised nations in the reduction of crime. The carelessness of clerical writers as to the truth of their statements on this subject is appalling. There is not a tittle of reason in criminal statistics, or any other exact indications of national health, for retaining religious lessons in our schools. They are there merely because the clergy find it conducive to their prestige to have their sacred book enthroned with honour in the national scheme of education. As in the case of divorce, they ask us to maintain immorality in the name of religion. German schools are saturated with religious teaching, yet we have seen the issue of it all. For one hundred years our English school-system has been hampered and perverted by this clerical insistence on religious lessons. Parents, they sometimes say, desire it; but when the Trades Union Congress, the only large body of parents which ever pronounced on the subject, repeatedly voted for secular education, by overwhelming majorities, the clergy, through the minority of their followers, could only secure the exclusion of the subject from the agenda. Neither do the majority of teachers desire it; while educationists, as a whole, resent this grievous complication of their work. Nothing but the complete secularisation of all schools receiving funds from the nation or municipality will enable us to advance. The clergy must do their own work on their own premises. The moral pretext is a thin disguise of an effort to use the nation's resources and authority for the purpose of attaching children to the churches. Writers on the subject are not wholly agreed whether we ought to substitute moral lessons for the discarded Bible lessons. We can in such a matter proceed only on probabilities, and it seems to me that judicious lessons for the training of character are very desirable. I do not so much mean abstract or direct lessons on the various qualities of character. If such lessons (on truthfulness, honesty, manliness, etc.) were tactfully and sensibly conducted, they could be of great service. There is really not much danger of turning the average British schoolboy into a prig. But indirect lessons, especially from history and biography, should be more effective.