have had, in face of a community, modern, enlightened, critical, and suspicious, to justify their existence."
This, as I understand it, is to declare that in Spain, where the system is practically supreme, the general education is deplorable, while in England, where the Roman Catholics form a small and, so far as the purely English element is concerned, an exceptional minority, they are on "their good behaviour," and kept up to the mark.[1] Can any admission be more damaging? But in dealing with the results of the Roman Catholic schools under the old denominational system in Victoria, we were unfortunately confronted with a state of things more like that of Spain than that of England. Had the Roman Catholic schools in the colony been at all up even to the very ordinary Protestant standard, I very gravely doubt whether the community would have disturbed them; most
- ↑ The English criminal statistics, however, tell a less flattering tale.—"The actual results range from fifteen, twenty, and forty per cent., up to gaols (as in Liverpool) where the Roman Catholic prisoners are considerably in excess of all others confined. In two great cities the Roman Catholic female prisoners have for several years averaged three times the numbers of the remainder of their sex."—Quarterly Review, January 1888, p. 60.
