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Date: 1867-06-07
By: True Witness
Citation: “No title”, True Witness (7 June, 1867)
Other formats: TBA
From the Montreal Herald‘s language upon the designs with respect to school matters, of the Protestant minority in Lower Canada, we have reasons to fear that an agitation upon this subject is about to be revived. We had fondly hoped that this was set at rest, and that nothing in this section of the country at all events, would occur to disturb the good understanding that happily obtains, and has long obtained, amongst all classes of Her Majesty’s subjects, Catholic and Protestant. Speaking of the article in the new Constitution relative to Education, the Herald of the 29th ult. says:—
“It enacts that the Lower Canadian minorities shall be entitled to as great facilities for establishing separate schools, as the minority of Upper Canada enjoy. But that is not what we suppose the Protestants of Lower Canada want; and if that will content them, they owe nothing to Mr. Galt, because they have long had as great and probably greater, facilities for establishing separate schools than are enjoyed by the minorities in Upper Canada.” The Italics are our own.
What then is it that the Protestant minority in Lower Canada want?—since they have, and long have had, thanks to the true liberality of the Catholic majority, greater facilities to manage their own school affairs, than Protestant Liberalism has accorded to the Catholic minority of Upper Canada. Equality with the latter is not what they want, so the Herald tells us; and in the latter part of the article from which we have already quoted, he a little more than insinuates what it is that they do want, and with less than which they will not be satisfied:—
What they really require is not the possession of facilities for separating from the public schools; but the equal right which belongs to every one in Canada West, to use the public schools without molestation from religious practices uncongenial to their creed. Those of them who understand their true position think that a national system of education should, like a high road or the water supply of a city, be free from positive practices which make it impossible to be used by all; and they have no more idea that they receive justice when they have permission to get up schools of their own, if they do not like the public ones, than they would have, if the highways or the public reservoirs were made distasteful to them, and they were offered the right to get up special roads and fountains; it being notorious that in a great many cases that would be utterly impossible.
We may be wrong; but, as we interpret the above exposition of the wants of the Protestant minority of Lower Canada, it seems to us that their design is, to substitute for the “denominational school system” now existing, a system of uniform State-Schoolism, obnoxious to the majority, and “uncongenial to their creed.” Not liberty from all restraint for themselves, but the power to impose their will upon others, is, according to our interpretation of the Herald‘s language, the design of the Protestant minority.
The reasoning of the Herald, or rather his sophistry, is in this wise:—Catholic conscientious objections to non-Catholic schools are unfounded, and cannot claim to be respected as a matter of right; the conscientious objections of non-Catholics to Catholic schools are well founded, and therefore as a matter of right may the Protestant minority of Lower Canada demand redress from the Legislature. Here our contemporary begs the question at issue; besides, who constituted him the judge of the validity of conscientious objections? All that he can do, all that the State can do is—having taken cognizance of the fact that the conscientious objections exist—to respect them;—for neither he nor the State, is competent to sit as a Court of Conscience. In fact, all religious persecution has been, and may be justified by the assumption that the State is a competent judge of the validity of conscientious objections, and is not bound, if it deem them invalid, to respect them. Thus the Tudors and Stuarts deemed the conscientious objections of the Puritans invalid, of the Covenanters invalid, of the Quakers invalid, and enacted against the obnoxious religionists the penalties of Acts of Uniformity, enforced by pillorying, ear-cropping, whipping, and death. The same logic as that which discriminates betwixt the validity of the respective claims to separate schools, of the minorities of Protestant Upper Canada, and of Catholic Lower Canada, would justify the most savage acts of the English Star Chamber, or of the Scotch Council at which a Lauderdale presided.
The Herald must permit us to point out another gratuitous assumption on his part, another dangerous fallacy of which, by implication, he is guilty. Because “water supply” and “roads” are legitimate subjects of the State’s jurisdiction, to which, when established by public money every one has a right, it does not follow that education is also a legitimate function of the same power. The first lies in the material or physical order in which we admit the civil magistrate to be supreme; the other, Education, lies in the moral order, wherein the State has no legitimate jurisdiction of its own. In other words, road making, and supplying water are legitimate functions of the civil magistrate. Education is not, neither is religion; and we will no more submit to State interference in the one than in the other.
No man has, or ever can have the right to claim that his child shall be educated at the public expence, or to insist that his neighbor shall be taxed for that purpose. Every man, having a child, and the moral responsibilities of a father upon his shoulders, is bound, as he shall answer to God at the peril of his soul, to look after the education of his own; neither can he devolve that duty upon others, neither can others deprive him of those rights over his child which are correlative to those duties, or moral obligations.—According to the theories of the Communists, of the Free-Lovists, indeed, and other Protestant sects, the child belongs to the public or State, which therefore has rights over and duties towards it. According to the doctrines of Christianity, and indeed for that matter, according to the precepts of natural religion, the child belongs to the Family, to which, therefore, all rights over, and all duties towards, the former are attached. Here is the point of divergence betwixt us, and our opponents. They assume that a system of “national education” is, not only highly advantageous in many respects—which we admit that under certain circumstances it may be—but that in consideration of its advantages, the State has the right—ignoring or trampling upon the conscientious scruples of its citizens, and the rival claims of the Family—to establish such a national system as to the majority of its citizens shall seem best. Here is what we deny; for we insist that, however important, however advantageous in some respects may be a national system of education, it is of more importance still, and in the long run more conducive to the well-being of society, that the conscientious scruples of the citizen even though in a minority, should be respected, and that the sanctuary of the Family should be inviolably guarded. If we were one homogeneous people, one in race, one in tongue, one in creed, one in opinion as to the chief object of education, and the manner in which it should be imparted, then might it be possible, without injustice to any, and with advantage to all, to lay the basis of one, uniform or homogeneous national system of Education.—But we live in Canada, not in Utopia; we must take men and things, not as we would fain have them to be, but as they are; and such being the case, and the differences of opinion as to the mode in which education should be given, being so many, so great, and so irreconcilable, it would be the height of folly and of injustice to subject all the people of Canada to one common system of teaching, to the same procrustean process of schooling. Let us try and realise the fact that we are of very different ways of thinking on the matter of education; that what pleases the one is repugnant to the other; and that therefore the only way to peace and union is to be found in the road of mutual forbearance, and mutual concessions. A uniform system of education that shall be satisfactory to Catholics, will necessarily be offensive to Protestants; and on the other hand, any uniform system that would satisfy the latter, would “be uncongenial to the creed,” of Catholics. It is therefore evident that, if we would be just to both, we must adopt either the “Denominational,” or the “Voluntary System” of Education. Of the two, we prefer the former; but rather than submit to the uniform system that the Herald hints at, we would insist upon the other or “Voluntary System,” thus casting the burden of feeding, clothing, physicking, and educating the child upon the Family.