Document Information

Date: 1867-05-29
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “The School Question in the Eastern Townships”, The Montreal Herald (29 May, 1867)
Other formats: TBA

THE SCHOOL QUESTION IN THE EASTERN TOWNSHIPS.

—In answer to a correspondent who writes on this subject, we reply that we do not think Confederation as such has put the Protestant minority of Lower Canada in any worse position, than that very bad one which they have hitherto occupied, wherever they are in numbers too small to [illegible] contributions. It does not interfere with the present law as to taxation levied on non-residents; but whether there may not be interference hereafter when the Protestant minority have no support from the West, remains to be seen. What Mr. Galt has done is to be seen in the article of the new constitution relative to Education. It enacts that the Lower Canadian minorities shall be entitled to as great facilities for establishing separate schools, as the minorities 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, 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.