Religion in Public Schools
By Editor
The Free Methodist Oregon Conference, in recent session, condemned dancing in public schools, and demanded that the Bible and religious instruction be reinstated in the public schools of the country. They believe that the divorcement in respect to Christian principles as obtaining in our public schools at the present time is largely due to the Catholic Church; but the demand for the Bible and religion in the public schools on the part of this Free Methodist Conference justifies all the demand that the Catholics have ever made for public money to support parochial schools. Logically, from every view-point, religion and the teaching of religion ought to be eliminated from public schools. A resolution was adopted asking the President of the United States to require persons of any and all denominations who are in the employ of Government schools to lay aside all distinctive religious garb during school hours. According to the compilations from the New York census, illiteracy has decreased in America during the last ten years, the percentage falling from 10.7 to 7.7. Illiteracy is greatest in the South. Iowa has the lowest per cent of illiteracy of any State, 1.7. New York, with its tremendous influx of foreigners, stands at 5.5—practically the same as ten years ago. Rhode Island is 7.7 against 8.4 ten years ago. The total number of illiterates in the United States is estimated at 5,516,693. Among the whites in the South it stands at 8 per cent of the population, and among the Negroes 33½ per cent. There has been encouraging gain among both classes. The last news from Durham, New Hampshire, is that there are 170 students out on strike, comprising practically all the members of the three lower classes of the College of New Hampshire, and the members of the senior class have passed resolutions supporting the lower classes. And all this because a student, the president of the sophomore class, was suspended for ringing a false alarm of fire on the chapel bell. The president of the college has refused to recognize him, and hence a strike. There are strikes on the railway, with more threatening—sympathetic—strikes in the newspaper offices and elsewhere. It is an age of striking. It is probable that a joint resolution of Congress, appropriating more than a million and a quarter dollars for the temporary relief of the flood sufferers in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, will pass. A bill has been introduced also to appropriate thirty million dollars for maintaining, raising, and protecting the levees of the Mississippi and its tributary rivers. Surely something ought to be done to give the people of the valley protection. The Sunday "Oregonian" of May 5 says that it will be the aim of the World's Christian Citizenship Conference which meets in Portland under the auspices of the National Reform Association in 1913, "to secure more stringent Sunday laws." The same paper also tells us that the Seventh-day Adventists are opposing the Sunday law propaganda of the National Reform Association. The present pope is said to have just completed one of the greatest works of the church, a complete codification of the laws of the Roman Catholic Church. It has been under the direction of Pope Pius, and in constant progress for eight years. It involved the codifying of every law, every papal bull, and every papal act pertaining to the authority of the church from the beginning. King Frederick VIII of Denmark, brother of the queen mother Alexandra of England and of the dowager empress Dagmar of Russia, dropped dead while walking the street in Hamburg, May 14, and Christian X, his oldest son, was proclaimed king the same day at 3 P.M. King Frederick was sixty-nine years of age. In Visalia, California, at the recent election, 994 votes were cast against the saloon, and it is estimated that 500 of those were cast by the women; ninety-five per cent, it is said, of the women's vote was cast in favor of the anti-saloon régime.