Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/310

State. But a Royal Commission, of which Mr. Higinbotham was the principal member, inquired into the working of these systems, and reported that in the denominational schools religious education was totally neglected except in the case of the Catholic schools. The remedy proposed under these circumstances cannot be matched out of "Gulliver's Travels." It was to punish those who had performed the duties they had undertaken, and reward those who had neglected them. The denominational schools were to be suppressed and a new system established under which something described as religion without dogma would be taught, and at which the attendance of children would be compulsory. To many members of the Church of England, and to the entire Catholic population, amounting together to nearly half the community, this proposal was profoundly objectionable. The main difficulty of the case was that Mr. Higinbotham was an honest man, possessed by a complete belief in his own fads. He was full of early prejudices, and as determined to insist upon them as upon the most obvious fundamental truths. Education supplies a more stringent control of character than natural endowments, and often contends successfully with the philosophy and experience of manhood. Thomas Carlyle, in the acme of his intellectual force and scornful indifference to thrones and conventions, was to the end of his life, in many of his prejudices, a Scotch Calvinist. And Mr. Higinbotham in manhood was influenced and controlled by the prejudices which an Irish Protestant boy rarely escapes. He had been educated at a school endowed from funds diverted from Catholic purposes, and in a Protestant University endowed with the confiscated lands of a Catholic University; but instead of being impatient to redress such wrongs for other Catholics when he came to power, he was prepared to inflict on them, in Australia, a system not widely different from that which they had endured in Ireland. He had ordinarily a lively sense of injustice, and in the case of any other people would have sympathised with the sufferers; but not so here. He was not a conscious bigot, but he had for allies all those who had transplanted the secret conspiracies and rancorous bigotry of the old world to the new—those who would not