that to substitute board schools for voluntary schools would cost the public nearly five millions, instead of two and a half, annually. In the second place, universal board schools would mean the negation of religious teaching as understood by the people at large. And such a system the people of this country would never consent to support. With the disappearance of the voluntary schools would commence the agitation against board schools, which in a very short time would follow their victims to the grave. What would come after it is impossible to say. The country, as Mr Balfour said, might possibly tolerate, though he did not think it would, either the Scotch or the Irish system; but in default of these there was no other plan possible than to keep up voluntary schools and board schools together, and no other way of doing it than the one laid down in the bill.

The friends of voluntary schools who are in favour of rate aid seem never to have considered how it is to be levied. It must be given by some local body-either the school board, as originally proposed in Mr Forster's bill, or by the town or parish council, or by some kindred authority.1 Is the local body to be compelled to give this aid, or is it to be at its own discretion? If the former, that would be taxation without representation; if the latter, then the rate might be granted at one time and refused at another. It must be either compulsory or capricious,-the one leading directly to popular control, the other placing the schools in a position in which they would never know their own incomes from year to year, and after incurring liabilities in reliance on the rate, might suddenly find themselves deprived

of it. It would be in vain for them then to try to regain subscribers who had naturally retired when rate aid was adopted.

There is yet another point to be considered ere we can admit that any parallel at all exists between voluntary schools and board schools, whether necessitous or not. When it it was supposed twenty-seven years ago that voluntary schools would be able to hold their own, primary education was something very different from what it has become since. What the voluntary schools undertook to do was to give elementary education as it was then understood, without any further State aid. As this elementary education has gradually expanded, the board schools have met the growing cost by an increasing rate. The one has risen in proportion to the other. They have been authorised to pay their additional expenses out of public money. Thus if they were now to receive an additional grant because one was given to the voluntary schools, they would be paid twice over for the same thing, a result which seems likewise to have escaped the notice of a good many writers on education.

Now that the bill is in Committee, no time must be lost. Mr Balfour cannot be too strongly urged to use all the means at his disposal for ensuring its being placed on the Statute-book by the date originally suggested. We hope that it is not yet too late to fulfil those expectations for which the Government themselves are responsible. In an article published in Maga' last July, under the title of "The Closure and Common-Sense," we pointed out that no false delicacy need

VOL. CLXI.-NO. DCCCCLXXVII.

21

now deter any Government from making use of the instrument which Parliament has placed in their hands. "Old times are changed, old manners gone." An entirely new mode of opposition has superseded the system known to Peel, Russell, and Tiernay. To meet the new method of attack we must employ a new method of defence. The tactics of Frederick the Great were found useless against Napoleon. The closure, as we said last year, must now be accepted as one of the regular organs of parliamentary procedure. We sympathise with the reluctance of Conservatives to have recourse to a system so little consistent with their own principles and traditions. But they need neither be ashamed nor afraid of exercising a power which has now become absolutely essential to freedom of legislation, and which their opponents are certain to employ without any constitutional scruples if ever their turn comes round again. Mr Balfour has to choose between two alternatives which are both extremes. He may either let legislation take its chance, thinking it enough that the people know the reason why; or he may secure the efficiency of parliamentary government by curtailing some of that liberty which members seem determined to abuse. He may either abdicate his functions, or uphold them by main force. The great party which he leads must decide between these alternatives, and let him know which they prefer, not only for the Education Bill, but for all Bills—not only for this session, but for all sessions. Which will they have? Will they con

sent to be contemptible for fear of being called tyrannical; or will they exert that authority which is vested in all Governments for their own protection, and throw themselves on the support of the public, who desire nothing more than to see an end to vacillation and indecision in the conduct of public affairs, and are ripe for almost any measures which may have the desired effect.

Seasons may arise when the departure from those maxims and principles which guide our conduct on ordinary occasions becomes a sacred duty, in obedience to a higher law.

Such a situation creates grave responsibilities, from which, however, no statesman, no honest and courageous citizen, ought to shrink. At the present moment every man is bound to consider by what means the efficiency of the Queen's Government, and the usefulness of the House of Commons, can be most successfully maintained. We must not sacrifice the end to the means. If, owing to such changes as we have just referred to, the action of the party system threatens to impede instead of assisting the progress of legislation, the maxims which held good at a previous period may no longer have any claim upon us. Freedom of debate is a privilege of great price. But it may be necessary to contract its limits in order to preserve its life; and statesmen who recognise this truth, and have the courage to act upon it, are the real friends of parliamentary institutions, and not those who would earn a little cheap popularity by denying or deriding it.

THERE could scarcely be a more curious literary sensation than to open a book by a French romancist, bearing all the appearance of a novel, and find in it, instead of those wearisome intrigues, enlivened more or less by sparks of wit, degraded more or less by noisome details of uncleanness, to which we are accustomed in that kind of production, a Pilgrim's Progress, neither less nor more, -the struggle of a soul, disgusted with vicious life and all its accompaniments, to find an opening into purer air, into faith and hope. That this should come to us under the name of a writer whose command of the varieties of circumstance in vice, and its favourite sentiments and descriptions, the dreadful lore of the so- - called Realist, is well known, and certifies its popularity by a stamp

of seizième édition on its titlepage, makes the wonder still more remarkable. Has France begun to disgust herself with her own special form of literature, and to learn that the obscene and impure are as dull as they are loathsome subjects of study, and that nothing is more monotonous than the record of vice in which she has so long tried to find entertainment? We think there are signs to this effect even in general literature; but so singular a work as the one before us could not be other than individual, and we cannot suppose that it marks any common movement, or is anything but the strange story of a soul satiated, disgusted, sickened by a life which at the same time does not seem to have been any worse than that of the ordinary hero of a French novel. The effect pro

VOL. CLXI.-NO. DCCCCLXXVIII.

2 K

duced by a jeunesse orageuse upon a man in the maturity of forty, attracted by better things, but unable to drag himself out of the evil habits which cling to him like the limbs of Victor Hugo's devilfish-haunted by horrible imaginations, even more when alone than when in the worst company, yet all the while straining and struggling to escape from the dreadful impasse in which he finds himself, -makes a very strange and novel picture, almost too sombre and terrible for the common eye. It is perhaps fortunate that such a struggle could scarcely ever find utterance in the natural reticence of English speech, and we do not know how the translator (for the book has been translated into English) can have managed to adapt it for ordinary reading; but the history of the recovery and conversion of Durtal is very novel and remarkable, and, as coming out of the centre of Parisian life and realistic literature, the most astonishing and impossible thing, though with every sign of truth, even fact, that could be conceived. "Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" would be a more appropriate motto than the sentence from St Bonaventura which appears on the title-page; but it need scarcely be said that among the crowd of saints quoted in the book St Paul has no place, and that the methods adopted for the saving of the sinful soul are scarcely his.

It is, however, of this subject that the book is full. Durtal, the hero, a man of letters and of the world, is suddenly presented to us in the last place in which we should expect to find the type of the cultured and unmoral Parisian, in the Church of Saint Sulpice, in which, indeed, his primary object

is to listen to the music for which it is famous, yet where he has wandered in his forlorn and painful search after some influence which can save him from himself and the world. The reader will at once perceive that this personage, so much unlike the many other members of his class whom we have known, must have been introduced first in some preliminary work: but we do not advise him to search for M. Durtal's antecedents in the book entitled La-bas, which represents him as still in the midst of the usual adventures which are supposed to be the commonplace of a young Frenchman's life, although already moved by the disgust with vice which is about to throw him into the arms of the Church as the only possible way of deliverance. This disgust is in full possession of his being; but his case is not one to be reached by the ordinary means, by the sermon which he hears going on in the distance of the great scarcely lighted church while he takes his seat in the darkness behind the altar to await the music. He hears the ordinary but indistinguishable voice of the preacher, which he recognises, "à la vaseline de son débit, à la graisse de son accent," to be that of "un prêtre solidement nourri," giving forth the usual commonplaces of

ces gargotiers d'ames" to his little congregation. Our sick and sorry sinner has nothing to do with these habitual discourses. He has been more or less interested in the mysteries of occultism, and even in the mysteries deeper still of some foul travesty of religion known as "Satanism," in which an apostate priest, with a small secret number of depraved followers, carries on awful rites, to the great curiosity at least, if no more, of Durtal and his friends. Indeed, in La- bas Durtal himself is

drawn into a particularly loathsome intrigue in order to penetrate the secret of this horrible sect, and succeeds in being present at a Messe Noire in honour of the

Devil, which, however, the writer has failed to invest with any intellectual horrors, so that we are left wholly unmoved, except by disgust, by the narrative with which he evidently hoped to shock and

stun us.

The occult and the Satanic have, however, both failed in exercising any influence over Durtal, and he is now obliged to confess that only in the Church can he find relief. The difficulty with which a highly educated Frenchman of his class

acknowledges this conclusion, half in despair, half in shame, is, however, very powerfully shown. The first point is made by the music which he loves, and we have a lengthened but brilliant description of the effect of the "De Profundis" and the "Dies Ira" sung by the choir of Saint Sulpice: and afterwards amid the strange mystic old-world charm of the little ancient church of Saint Severin, neglected and beautiful, where he attends the Sunday Mass, taking refuge in a dark corner, hiding himself and his strange emotions-for the fear of being taken for a fool was still strong upon him; "the idea of being seen on his knees in a church filled him with horror; the thought, if ever he communicated, of rising, meeting every body's gaze as he went forward to the altar, was intolerable to him."

Strange adventures, however, befell him as he roamed from one church to another, always enveloped in his own thoughts. Once he found himself by hazard in the chapel of a convent buried in the depths of shabby streets, a shabby little chapel full of nuns in their long veils, of a whole

pensionnat of girls, and a dim background of other women, himself the only man visible.

"The atmosphere became extraordinary; this furnace of souls warmed the ice of the little building. These were no longer the wealthy vespers of St Sulpice; they were the vespers of the poor, the vespers of a family, in the plain-song of the fields, followed by the faithful worshippers with a prodigious fervour, in an Durtal felt himself transported into abstraction of inconceivable silence. the depths of a village, of a convent; his heart melted, his soul rocked as in a cradle by the monotonous breadth of the singing. He felt a real impulse, a dumb necessity, to pray also to the Incomprehensible: surrounded by these breathings, penetrated by the found himself, it seemed to him that influences of the place in which he his being dissolved, that he could even participate far off in the tender unity of these simple souls. He tried to remember a prayer, but recalled only that which St Paphnucius taught to Thaïs when he said to her, 'Thou art not worthy to name God, thou canst only pray thus: Qui plasmasti me, miserere mei. Thou who hast created me, have mercy upon me.' He faltered this humble phrase, praying not for love or for contrition, but lessness of getting free of himself, in in disgust of himself, in the powerregret that he could not love. Then he thought of saying the Pater, but stopped short in the idea that this prayer was the most difficult of all when the weight of its words is fully considered. Do not we declare to God in fact that we have forgiven the sins of our neighbour? among those who address these words to God, how many have pardoned their neighbours?"

But

From this strange mixture of sentiments Durtal is roused by seeing the priest and the beadle looking at him, and presently the latter approaches him, as he supposes with the intention of bidding him leave the church, as the only man in such an assemblage