The Sedalia Weekly Bazoo

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

It is impossible for the people in this part of the State to view with indifference the bitter fight which has been inaugurated against the public school system of St. Louis. It springs up under conditions so startling, and aims so momentous, that the people of the State may well indulge the gravest apprehensions for its safety. Nor does this assault come from a sectarian standpoint. It is not engineered by Catholics who have schools and universities of their own, and who have sought to divert a portion of the public revenues to their support. The opposition is masked in a more insidious guise. It comes from a class of people who believe that the public school system should be so arranged as to exclude anything from its course of study but the elementary principles of instruction. They want the high schools abolished and all the higher branches of polite education rigidly suppressed. When it is stated that this opposition has sprung from what is known as German Infidels, a class of population which numbers an immense percentage of the people of St. Louis, the character of the contest will be understood as involving the life of the public school system in the country.

They war against all sects and all religions. They have dreamed that in this vast empire of mixed populations, with new industries and institutions, and an intelligence quick in apprehension and aggressive in sentiment, that the field has been discovered for that most repulsive of all impassive metaphysics, German Socialism, to take root. They seek to limit the range of common school education, and then exclude by law the use of the Bible or any other sectarian or religious publication in institutions which derive their support in whole or in part from the public revenue.

This done, says the Infidel, "the young minds of the youth of America will be open for the reception of those rational views of life in which bigotry and superstition find no part." It may well be doubted if this would be a compensation for the loss of all which they propose to take away. The high schools are completing the education of innumerable youth. In many of the large towns they have taken the places of colleges and seminaries, and are enabling the poor to reap advantages which heretofore belonged exclusively to the rich. They are rearing in every State in the Union young men and women whose rage for learning would otherwise be repressed by the chill of penury; and are training intellects which will make their way in art or science, and lend luster to the world of letters, when those who would wither their opportunities are sleeping in unforgotten graves. No man in this country has ever yet felt the burden of the school tax. No one ever will. It grows as industry widens and wealth augments; a silent and invisible spirit of good, which, like an angel visitant, shakes blessings from its wings. It hovers over hovels, and the hut sings with joy—it enters the rude cabin of the laborer, and intelligence brightens in its pathway; it touches with its wand the sluggish senses and kindles upon the altars of the heart a thirst for Promethean fire. It breaks the chains of ignorance and throws wide its prison doors. Out of the darkness it calls the fettered mind and makes the wilderness of superstition bloom like the garden of knowledge. Can we barter all this for the soulless, mindless, churchless future of the Infidel?