ROMAN CATHOLICS AND THE SCHOOLS.
THE Roman Catholics of the Northwest appear to be making a carefully planned war upon the public-school system, and they are meeting with enough success in isolated cases to arouse general interest in the question. In one district of the town of Barton, Wis., the Catholics rallied in force at the annual meeting last year, and carried a resolution that no public school should be maintained during the year, and none was held. This year the contest was renewed, but the Catholics took advantage of the new law giving women the right to vote at school elections, to bring out all their women, and carried the same resolution again. At Melrose, Minn., the Catholic priests engineered a movement to shorten the school year of the public schools, in order to compel children to attend a parochial school. Throughout Stearns County, Minn., the Roman catechism is said to be taught openly in the public schools, and either the opening or the closing hours of the session are devoted to religious instruction given by the priests, all this being in direct violation of the State constitution, and especially of an amendment adopted in 1877 to meet this very condition. Most of this work has been done so quietly as not to attract wide attention, but the evidences of a determined assault upon the public-school system are now so clear that its friends are becoming aroused to the necessity of action.—New York Evening Post.