Mr. Vernon Harcourt, M.P., writing in Monday's Times, breaks out
into veritable raptures over the statesmanship of Lord Russell's first letter, and humbly endeavours to lend it the weight of his argument,—asserting that if the plan to which Mr. Gladstone's speech seemed to point were adopted, namely, the loan of the school-room out of school-hours to the religious teachers of the minorities who might object to the schoolmasters' teaching, the school-room would become a field for the ostentatious display of religious animosities, the different religious teachers in turn anathematizing the others. As the youthful audience of one religious teacher would not be the audience of another, we cannot see the exact force of Mr. Vernon Harcourt's imaginative fears. Apparently he is quite ignorant of the plan actually pursued in Ireland, where, if anywhere, religious animosities would be likely to be vivid, and where no such disastrous effects occur,—a plan which was probably in Mr. Gladstone's mind. There the religious teachers approved by the parents or guardians have, in the case of vested schools, " access to them in the school-room ;" and in the case of non-vested schools, the patrons determine what religious teaching, if any, shall be given in the school-room, being compelled to permit the absence of all children not so taught, on the request of their parents and guardians, for the purpose of having religious teaching elsewhere. On a subject of this kind it is a pity that Mr. Harcourt should create additional difficulties by the exercise of the a priori faculties of his pure reason. There are enough of a more solid order without those.
