But can they be safely parted in the case of a populace either degraded or still savage; given up to the 'lusts of the flesh'; with no desire for improvement, and ignorant of that 'moral ideal,' without the influence of which, as my friend Professor Huxley well says, there can be no true education?
It is well if such a people can be made to submit to one system of education.

Is it wise to try to burden them with two at once?
But if one system is to give way to the other, which is the more important: to teach them the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic; or the elements of duty and morals?
And how these latter can be taught without religion is a problem as yet unsolved.
So argued some of the Protestant and the whole of the Roman Catholic clergy of Trinidad, and withdrew their support from the Government schools, to such an extent that at least three-fourths of the children, I understand, went to no school at all.
The Roman Catholic clergy had, certainly, much to urge on their own behalf.

The great majority of the coloured population of the island, besides a large proportion of the white, belonged to their creed.

Their influence was the chief (I had almost said the only) civilising and Christianising influence at work on the lower orders of their own coloured people.

They knew, none so well, how much the Negro required, not merely to be instructed, but to be reclaimed from gross and ruinous vices.