over the masses. The future of the human race, its youth, is entrusted to the priests. Under the tsars, the maintenance of religious fanaticism, the maintenance of stupidity and ignorance, was regarded as a matter of great importance to the State. Religion was the leading subject of instruction in the schools. In the schools, moreover, the autocracy supported the church, and the church supported the autocracy. In addition to compulsory religious teaching in the schools and compulsory attendance at religious services, the church had other weapons. It began to take charge of the whole of popular education, and for this purpose Russia was covered with a network of church schools.
Thanks to the union of school and church, our young people were from their earliest years thralls to religious superstition, this making it practically impossible to convey to their minds any integral outlook upon the universe. To one and the same question (for instance concerning the origin of the world) religion and science give conflicting answers, so that the impressionable mind of the pupil becomes a battle ground between exact knowledge and the gross errors of obscurantists.
In many countries, young people are trained, not only in a spirit of submissiveness towards the dominant regime, but also in a spirit of submissiveness towards the overthrown autocratic-ecclesiastico-feudal order. This happens in France. Even from the outlook of the bourgeois State, propaganda of such a kind is reactionary.
The program of bourgeois liberalism used to contain a demand for the separation of the school from the church. The liberals fought for the replacement of religious instruction in the schools by instruction in bourgeois morality; and they demanded the closing of schools organised by religious associations and by monasteries. Nowhere, however, was this struggle carried through to an end. In France, for instance, where for two decades all the bourgeois ministries had solemnly pledged themselves to dissolve the religious orders, to confiscate their property, and to forbid