4 SEPTEMBER 1875, Page 2

The French papers, being nearly as much in want of

subjects as the English, and being rather at sea about the Ilerzegovina, are making a great deal of a reported split in the Radical camp. M. Naquet, it is said, has finally decided that a Republic with a Head elected for a term of years is a Monarchy, and is stumping the cities to induce the electors to think so too. We have elsewhere shown reason to believe that this split, which was inevitable sooner or later, will not have serious consequences, but may mention here that M. Gambetta's own paper, La Republique Fran vise, takes no notice of it, devoting its attention entirely to the "liberty of education" obtained by M. Dupanloup. The notion of a Catholic University seems greatly to irritate the Radicals, who probably dread that the mothers will send their children to inferior but pious schools, rather than to good but irreligious schools, and who forget that if the Catholics do not teach well, they deliberately weight their own party in the race of life. The real objection to a multiplicity of Universi-

ties is not the religious one, but the certainty that competing Universities will, to secure patronage, lower the standard for degrees, and so degrade all secular education.