Pulbic Opinion.

Hawke's Bay Times, Issue 1584, 12 June 1874, Page 249

Pulbic Opinion.

THE REV. MR. BRUCE ON EDUCATION. New Zealand Herald. Mr Bruce, in what we regard as the speech of the evening, spoke in language measured, weighty, and full of wisdomlanguage in striking contrast with the vehement denunciation and inflated style characterising the utterances of others of hie clerical brethren. He denounced the .attempt to establish any system of separate gchools brauded with a really pauper mark, and under the guise of benevolence consigning to them the children of our poorer fellow-citizens. He denounced any distinction between man and man in a system initiated by the State for the good of the whole people. For his own part he would have gladly seen the Bible read if not expounded in the public schools. It would have been gratifying to his own feelings and to the feelings of the large congregation of which he is the representative. But he was aware that there could be no union with the Roman Catholics on this basis, for the sake of that union he and others willingly surrendered their point. But a system of public instruction was indispensable. It meant co-operation in a great work which could not bo advantageously conducted without such co-operation, and he had no fear of evil from the secular system while the clergy and others whose duty it was to Bee to the religious welfare of their people did their work with devotion and zeal. Mr Bruce spoke, in short, in the name of our common humanity, and he rose a head and shoulders above the speakers whose views on this great subject are limited to the horizon of their own church, their own class, or their own party. To those who cry out tor a General Government tax in preference to that proposed by the Provincial Government, we have only to say that while in the one case they may exercise a reasonable influence over the legislation on the subject, in the other they will be helpless, and meetings in the Mechanics' Hall or elsewhere be of no avail. Their protests will be unheard, and however great the difficulties of the present position, those of the position in which they would be then placed must be tenfold greater, while the administration will be entirely beyond their control.

MB GLADSTONE'S ADMINIBTBATION

The London Spectator in an article entitled " Characteristics of the Late Administration " thus summarises the character of the Gladstone regime : "On the whole Mr Gladstone's five years have been the great five years of the last half-century in legislation, and it is not easy to suppose that this generation will see anything so good again. His faults have been the faults of an over-concentrated political genius, as his achievements have been the achievements that only great concentration could hare carried. Under the contagious influence of his singleness of purpose and his zeal, some of his colleagues have grown into departmental chiefs as great as was he himself when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, though without much intellectual moulding from his supervision. And after every defect that can be reckoned up has been displayed in its worst light, the Administration that redeemed the soil of Ireland and the Army of England,—that relieved a Catholic people from the incubus of a Protestant Establishment,—that pledged the country to educate all its children, and to give the most capable the opportunity of rising to the highest places in society,—that recast the Judicature, and made the Navy- new, —and that did all this in the face of the most urgent temptations to cast its promises to the winds, will be remembered as the great administration of the century, in spite of even serious errors in foreign policy, or an occasional sophistical construction of-an Act of Parliament. •