AN INGENIOUS DEVICE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 929, 18 March 1882, Page 3

AN INGENIOUS DEVICE.

It woukls be odd if a Jesuit (says the Pall Mall Gazette) were not a match for an inconvenient law. The Jesuits of Poitiers are said to have invented an ingenious method of evading the decrees of last year aimed against the unauthorised congregations. Their college, of course, was closed, and its members dispersed. But shortly after the dissolution one of their number applied as a private person for a license to open a school for free secondary instruction. He appealed to the common law, and the authorities had no choice but to grant the license ; whereupon a second father applied for a second license, and, finally, Poitiers awoke to the fact that the town possessed not one, but live, Jesuit colleges, managed on the most singular system. Each confined itself to one faculty. One taught Greek, another Latin, a third history,a fourth geography, and the fifth science, the seolars of scourse perambulating from one to the another under the careful eye of the Society, and thus passing their studious youth amid the most unimpeachable devout surroundingsHow to be even with the fathers has cost the authorities of Poitiers a good deal of thought. Finally, however, M. Chaignet, the rector of the university lias belled the cat by summoning the five soi disant schoolmasters before the Academical Council on a charge of having “re-constituted a congregation legally dissolved, or of having connived at its re-consti-tution.” M. Chaignet will probably win his case; but it is almost a pity a project so ingenious should be defeated.