of Piedmont. The party of progress regarded this as a mere temporary compromise, and demanded a far more radical reform. The government brought before the Italian Parliament a bill for the dissolution of all religious corporations. Baron Natoli says that the majority in the country desired such a measure. But the time was, at all events, not fully ripe for it, and the bill was, as we all remember, withdrawn.

Regarding, however, the respited corporations as certainly doomed, and their dissolution as only adjourned for a little while, the minister has taken the inventory of his victims' effects. It appears that there are 63 institutions in which secondary instruction is given by religious corporations. These institutions have 462 teachers and 5,752 boys. The girls are much more numerous. Of the boys 30 per cent. are boarders. Primary instruction, with which I am not now concerned, is given by the religious corporations to a far larger body of pupils, and among these, again, the girls far outnumber the boys.*

The minister speaks unfavourably of the instruction given by the religious. Attentively read, however, his criticisms point rather to disaffection in these teachers than to ignorance and incompetence. He says that their teaching tends to make bad citizens, and to keep up a spirit of resistance to the new order of things in Italy. He relates that when a royal inspector asked a girl in a school of the Ursuline nuns at Benevento who was the king of Italy, the girl, to avoid acknowledging the lawful sovereign, answered: Il nostro re è Gesù Cristo. He maintains that letters and sciences get a peculiar and illiberal tinge when taught in the cloister. He adds, going to more indisputable ground, that the management of their property by the religious corporations is in the highest degree wasteful and injudicious, and that in many cases funds once ample have by this management been rendered insufficient for the proper maintenance of the schools. In other cases funds still ample are abused; and he cites the instance of a college for girls at Milan, where with a revenue

The numbers are as follows: total number of pupils of the religious corporations, 97,440; 62,901 girls and 18,712 boys. Of the latter, 12,960 are receiving primary instruction; 5,752 (as I have said) secondary.

of 8,000l. a year a band of 37 governesses and lay sisters maintain and teach 30 pupils.

The minister has been able to deal with the seminaries more effectually than with the schools of the religious corporations. The seminaries were instituted by the Council of Trent to train young men for holy orders without exposing them to the influence of the universities. These schools were placed in every diocese; they were governed by a rector whom the bishop nominated; they were subsidised out of the bishop's revenues, and entirely under his control. At first they confined themselves to their original design of solely training for the priesthood, and even exacted repayment from those who after benefiting by their endowments did not proceed into orders. Soon, however, their character changed. It was according to the notions of those days that education should be under clerical direction; persons desirous to found an endowment for the instruction of the lay youth in their locality founded it in connection with the seminaries. Municipalities, too poor to establish schools of their own, assigned grants to the seminaries on condition of their undertaking the instruction of those children who required it. The governments of the old time, looking upon the clergy as their natural and useful allies, not only did their best to get lay schools attached to the seminaries, augmenting their property from the State domains, or diverting lay and communal foundations for their benefit,-but they also tried to put under the bishops' rule the schools of the religious corporations. The bishops were glad of the additional influence which an extended control over education placed in their hands. So it comes to pass that the kingdom of Italy, which has the prodigious number of 231 dioceses, has 260 seminaries or episcopal schools, one for each diocese and 29 to spare. These schools have 13,174 scholars, of whom 9,726 are boarders. There are 1,208 of their pupils under 12 years of age; the vocation of these, therefore, cannot be supposed to be yet very strongly declared. As many as 1,297 boys wear the lay costume and make no profession of any intention to go into orders; 8,429 wear the clerical habit, but numbers of these wear it for a time only, for the sake of a host of small ex

hibitions given by the seminaries to youths professing to prepare for orders, and for the sake of exemption from military service. When their object has been gained, when they have enjoyed their exhibition and escaped the conscription, they renounce their intention of going into orders. The recruitment for the clergy is becoming difficult in Italy, and this with 260 seminaries to serve as a field for it.

In fact not more than 52 of these institutions are real theological colleges. The mass of them are very indifferent secondary schools, too numerous to be well off either in good teachers or in pupils. They have on an average but 57 pupils to each institution, and 12 pupils to each class. The inquiries made by the minister convinced him of the general weakness of seminary instruction. The theological studies themselves are in a very depressed condition; with these, however, the State assumes no right to meddle. It leaves the care of these to the bishops, to whom the Council of Trent gave it. But the legislation of 1859 gives to the government in Italy the right of inspecting all establishments of secondary instruction, of exacting certain guarantees of capacity from those who conduct them, and of satisfying itself that nothing in their teaching or management violates morality or the laws. It was notorious that the seminaries openly preached disaffection. Two of them had become a public scandal from proved immorality. In most of them the teaching, consisting of Latin, a little Italian,-not the Italian of the classics of Italy, but an Italian false in taste and false in style,―very little arithmetic or mathematics, still less geography and history, and no study of the natural sciences at all, was quite unsuited to the wants of the present day. The schools of the religious associations had at least admitted inspection and satisfied the law by providing their teachers with the requisite certificates (patenti d'idoneità). But the ordinaries of the Italian dioceses maintained that State inspection of the seminaries was contrary to the laws of the church, which gives to the bishops the sole superintendence of the instruction and education in the seminaries. Employing a line of argument familiar to the clergy everywhere, they asked who but the bishops ought to exercise this superintendence, since

they were to answer before God for the learning and virtue of those on whom they at ordination laid their hands. The government replied that of the learning and virtue of those whom they were going to ordain it left them the sole guardians, but that it had to satisfy itself about the learning and virtue of that great majority of their pupils who were destined to lay callings. A very few bishops accepted inspection with a good grace; many submitted reluctantly; some broke up their seminaries sooner than admit it; others shut their school-doors against it. The government persisted, and ordered the closing of all seminaries which would not admit the State inspector.

Eighty-two were closed by the middle of the year 1865. Then, by a decree dated the 1st of September in that year, the government ordered the reopening of all the seminaries which had been closed. But they were to reopen far other than they had closed. The State sequestrated their whole revenues. One-third it gave back, in each seminary, to the ordinary for a strictly theological college; the other twothirds it assigned to the municipality for the purposes of public and lay secondary instruction. The task of seeing the work of partition and transformation carried into effect was committed to a gentleman who has many friends in this country, Signor Fusco. He accomplished his commission during the spring of 1866.

CHAPTER XIII.

REFORMS PROPOSED FOR SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES IN ITALY.

THE EXECUTIVE SUPPORTED IN ITS REFORMS BY PUBLIC OPINION EXTENSIVE REFORMS PROPOSED FOR THE UNIVERSITIES AND LAY SCHOOLS-NEED OF THE REFORMS PROPOSED-INTELLIGENCE OF ITALIAN STATESMEN.

THE

\HE Italian reformers of public instruction consider, however, that they have thus made only a beginning in what needs to be done with the seminaries. The minister announces a plan for reducing the 231 dioceses of the Italian kingdom at one blow to 59, a diocese for each province. Each diocese is to have one real theological college, alto istituto seminaristico, for training its clergy. This institution is alone to enjoy that exemption from State inspection which the seminaries claim. Schools for the laity are to be under laymen; or, if ecclesiastics wish to conduct such schools, they must conduct them on the same conditions as laymen, by providing themselves with the legal guarantees of capacity, and by admitting State inspection.

The English jealousy of the executive, and reverence for vested interests, would probably incline us to designate these proceedings (at least it would if they were not employed against Papists) as tyrannical. I will only observe that in every single instance where a seminary has been closed, the local municipality has declared its satisfaction with the measure; in every single instance where endeavours have been made to get a closed seminary reopened, the local municipality has petitioned the government not to reopen it. The executive in Italy is in fact at this moment much stronger than even in France. It represents the lay and civil elements in society; and the Italians, or that part of them which really determines the national policy, know that