On the 20th of March 1895 the following resolution of the Methodist Ministerial Association of Winnipeg was sent to the Dominion Premier at Ottawa:

'Fearing lest silence be construed as indifference, we respectfully but firmly protest against interference with the school system of Manitoba as established by law: First, because by this law no injustice is done to any individual; secondly, because such interference would infringe upon provincial rights, &c.,' and Methodist ministers. were requested to preach upon it. This pronouncement is a curiosity in its way.

The following utterances lay stress upon religious requirements, and show how far certain of the Protestant authorities are from desiring religion to be divorced from the school teaching.

On the 21st of November 1895 the Rev. Principal King, in moving resolutions on the schools question before the Presbyterian synod of Manitoba, said that he could not protest too strongly against the view that there should be no connection between religion and the action of the State, including its action in the matter of education— ' a view which, if it obtained, would deprive society as an organisation of all religious sanctions and found it on a purely secular basis.'

On the 18th of April 1895 the pastor of the Central Congregational Church in Winnipeg, during a lecture on the schools question, argued thus: It is the business of the State to provide moral training. But moral training will be ineffective unless supported by the sentiments and sanctions of religion. Therefore what? It is the business of the State to provide religious teaching.' And recapitulating, 'What then is the duty of the State? First, to teach religion in so far as it can do that without violating the fundamental principles of religion; and, second, to extend all hospitality and encouragement consistent with justice to the agencies whose business it is to teach religion.'

To come now to the actual facts as to religious teaching and exercises in these non-sectarian' schools. The regulations say: To establish the habit of right doing, instruction in moral principles must be accompanied by training in moral practice. The teacher's influence and example, current incidents, stories, memory gems, sentiments in the school-lesson, examination of motives that prompt to action, didactic talks, teaching the Ten Commandments, &c., are means to be employed.'

(Query, according to what faith?)

As to religious exercises, they provide a number of selections from the Bible (either version), which may be read without comment; a prayer such as would be used by Trinitarian Protestants; the Lord's Prayer, and the Benediction.'

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Thus it will be seen that certain 'Protestants' are allowed to introduce the quantum of religion that will satisfy their consciences,

while the Roman Catholics are denied the same liberty: such a modicum of religion is to them utterly inadequate for the education of their children; and they are not allowed a voice in the matter even in the districts where their children form the main school population. And yet it is solemnly affirmed that the schools are not Protestant ! The religious observance prescribed by the advisory board can certainly not be styled Jewish, nor Unitarian, and emphatically not Romanist. What then is the name of it? Is there any other name for it than 'Protestant'? and are not the schools non-sectarian Protestant schools?

What a farce is the whole proceeding! Public schools are set up and labelled 'non-sectarian' in the Act creating them. Then the Protestants are openly permitted to get their foot in as far as suits them, while the Roman Catholics are refused even an inch of standing ground.

Englishmen, I suppose, will scarcely credit the fact that there is no practical difficulty in the way of giving separate schools to the Roman Catholics. The Manitoba Government say that they can scarcely maintain one school in sparsely-settled districts. Quite so: then in such cases it would be clearly impossible and absurd to set up another for two or three Roman Catholic children. The law does not demand impossibilities, and pioneers who go out to reclaim the wilderness do not expect all the advantages of civilisation. In Winnipeg, Brandon, the Portage, and perhaps some other towns, there would probably be enough Roman Catholic children to fill separate schools without trouble. As to the bulk of the Roman Catholic population, they are massed together in their own districts. Their chief settlement is at St. Boniface, a French-Canadian town on the banks of the Red River, opposite to Winnipeg, where is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishop. The old Roman Catholic half-breed people are settled in their own parishes on the banks of the Red River, the Assiniboine, and some smaller rivers. Their lands were of the shape of a long piece of tape stretched out. Each strip was a few chains in width, abutting on the river, and going back two miles into the prairie, with two miles further for 'hay-privilege,' known in both common and legal parlance as the 'inner' and 'outer' two miles; while the houses were in a string along the river-banks, for the sake of mutual protection and society for the inmates. Could anything be simpler than such a situation?

To understand the rancour that has been aroused in this dispute by the stirring up of religious animosities by the Orange Lodges and certain Protestant speakers throughout the Dominion, Englishmen would have to go back to the state of feeling aroused by the Tractarian movement in this country, or the Romanist aggression in the days of Earl Russell. And the irony of the situation lies in the fact that the provision in the Act under which the Roman Catholics are claiming

relief was really introduced for the benefit of a future Protestant minority, the population having increased in the opposite way to what was at the time expected by many would be the case.

What then is the meaning of the conduct of the Liberal Government of Manitoba? We can only judge from what appears on the surface, and this subject alone would suffice for a separate article. They have continuously interposed delays and hindrances and opposition to any settlement of the difficulty on the plain lines of justice to the minority, but they have committed the fatal blunder of making too many excuses for their conduct. In their answer to the Remedial Order' they alleged the difficulties of maintaining an efficient system of education even under present circumstances, and that the establishment of separate schools for the Roman Catholics would greatly impair that system, while the possible prospect of further separate schools for the Church of England, for the Mennonites, and for the Icelanders would be simply appalling. The position is entirely imaginary, for there is no saving of such rights, except to 'the Protestant or Roman Catholic minority of the Queen's subjects.' It must always be borne in mind that the provincial Government is of one political type, while the federal Government is of the opposite.

Even after the introduction of their own Remedial Bill' in February last, the Dominion authorities did not neglect to give the Provincial Government an opportunity of themselves dealing with this matter. After the Bill had been read a second time, they so far endeavoured to meet the wishes of the provincial authorities as to send Sir Donald Smith and two of the Ministers as Special Commissioners to Winnipeg, to see if a satisfactory compromise could not be arrived at, but even these negotiations failed to bring about a settlement. The Government went on with their measure, but were met in Committee by the grossest obstruction, one member reading chapters of the Bible with dissertations thereon, and another spending an hour in giving selections from the Bab Ballads with appropriate comments. The committee sat continuously during the whole of Easter week, but the Opposition persistently played to the gallery,' knowing that the whole question would have to be threshed out again at the polls, and thus, as I have said, rendered it impossible to pass the measure in the short time remaining before the dissolution of Parliament.

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Such are the main points in the history of the Manitoba schools difficulty, in grappling with which the Dominion Government are to be congratulated on having steadfastly followed the straight line of duty-justice to the minority under the Constitution.

T. C. DOWN.

THE MUSIC-HALLS

LATE on a Saturday evening, two months ago, I was standing at the portals of Gatti's Music-hall, in the Westminster Bridge Road, reading the programme of the entertainment within. Was it worth while to enter? Every one else had long since made up his mind: the evening was far spent; the sound of the accompanying orchestra -the band in fullest swing supporting some vocalist or dancer on the stage-penetrated to the street; no one now was expected; the ticket-giver behind the fortifications of his office was dozing in security; the functions of the chucker-out '--if such there be-were at all events suspended; and no one stood in the doorway but myself and an undersized, slightly built, ragged-bearded person of uncertain gait, who examined me while I examined the programme. One always knows when one is being looked at, so eventually I turned upon him: was he perhaps labouring under some temporary difficulty of locomotion? He was, in any case, one of whom it was safe to predicate that energetic action was never his characteristic. He was less an active participator in Life than an impartial observer of it. There are those who would have called him a 'loafer;' and it may be that a loafer' he was. Anyhow he desired speech with me, and remarked, with an infirmity of deliverance which it would have been charitable to attribute to a quite recent indulgence in whatever may take the place of the wine-cup in the Westminster Bridge Road, that I was looking at the bill of the hall. I admitted that circumstance, and further replied that it appeared to me the bill was not a strong one. He took some umbrage at the statement. He addressed me suddenly with unsuspected eloquence, though in a tone more philosophical than vehement. What, then, was his interest in the hall? It became clear, in a minute or two, that he had no interest in the hall whatever. But he looked at Life largely, and the line of his argument with me-so far as his long-accumulated infirmities and a very recent debauch allowed him to indicate it was that if a man went into a place of entertainment, he must go to it with the intention of being entertained; not seeking curiously for any particular artist, nor weighing anxiously the items in the programme, nor wanting any specialty,' but minded to 'receive,' and above all to be satisfied with, whatever in the good

providence of the management might be proffered for his joy. I had read to me a moral lesson. I wished the ragged-bearded observer of the world Good-night, with the respect due to any fellow creature whose theories are sound-even if his practice be imperfect. I crossed Westminster Bridge again, sadder and wiser. And I trust that the large tolerance so conspicuous in my friend may not be wholly wanting to the tone of this article.

And indeed a large tolerance is very much required from any one who, having seen great Art, the art of Aimée Desclée and Sarah Bernhardt, of Got and Mrs. Kendal and Henry Irving, betakes himself to a little study of the Music-Hall-an institution which, though I would look at it without prejudice, as a thing which meets and satisfies at all events an immense popular demand, I yet cannot take very seriously in regard to the opportunity that it at present affords for the exhibition of the comedian's or the vocalist's art. I am, perhaps, old-fashioned in this matter: I know I lag behind Mr. Walter Sickert, and, I think, behind Mr. Arthur Symons. The music-hall is popular, and will continue to be popular; but it will have to develop itself further, and, in my opinion, to change at least certain of its ways if it is to continue to be fashionable. Indeed, even now it would be very easy to exaggerate its vogue. The fashionable music-halls are chiefly the two or three which have already left behind them many of the music-hall's older characteristics. The Palace Theatre of Varieties, and yet more the Empire and the Alhambra, rely in great measure upon sources of attraction not known to the earlier successors of the 'free-and-easy-that is, of the public-house concert, which was the real origin of the halls and not known much, even to-day, to the average hall, frequented chiefly by the inhabitants of its particular quarter, whether the quarter be Drury Lane and the hall the Middlesex, or whether it be Pimlico and the hall the Standard, or Battersea and the hall the Washington.

At the three great halls that I have mentioned of the newer and more fashionable kind-the Palace, Empire, Alhambra--what has happened is that an immense and novel importance has been assigned to spectacle. Now, the essence of the music-hall proper-taking the word in its older sense-is that the place is a place for the exhibition of what may be supposed to be the talent or the charm of the individual performer; a dozen individual performers-sometimes, with the brevity of the modern 'turn,' two dozen individual performers-succeeding each other rapidly: the chief spectacle, the spectacle of their talent, or of their attire, their art and charm -if you are minded to call it so-exhibited in front of a flat scene which, though frequently changed, as often as not has not, and does not profess to have, any necessary or even discernible connection. with the figure strutting its hour in front of it. But at the Palace Theatre of Varieties, which the veteran Mr. Morton manages excelVOL. XL-No. 233

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