M. Pelletan has reported on some few of the petitions
sent in against M. Jules Ferry's Education Bill, and declares that the signatures to the petitions have been got up in a most wholesale and unscrupulous way,----which is most likely true. But just as he was concluding his report on these few petitions, a new peti- tion, with considerably over a million signatures, came in ; and while some statements put the total number of signatures against the Bill at eleven millions, the most favourable of the Catholic statements puts it at sixteen millions. Out of numbers such as these, you may allow two-thirds, if you please, of the signatures, for unscrupulous organisatioin, and you will still be leftwith a nucleus of popular aversion suet as it would be very childish to provoke, even if statesmen like M. Jules Simon had produeed no other and hotter reason againat the worst clause in the Bill. Nobody pretends that anything like large numbers have petitioned in favour of the Bill as it is. Doubtless it ex- cites a certain amount of enthusiasm among the operatives of large towns, but not such as would induce them to apply great popular pressure in its favour. To pass it as it is would be most dangerous. To reject its seventh clause at least, weal(' involve no danger of popular discontent at all.
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