Show MONTGOMERY AGAIN The new Assistant Attorney General has not fallen on happy years and joyous days in his new appointment Against him was made every charge for which a man can be politically damned In turn he has been ugly beyond expression so ugly that he was a very nightmare to a great many but more especially to the Republicans Then he was a secessionist secession-ist more than Toombs himself although Montgomery did not have to be reconstructed re-constructed lie was secessionist chiefly because he was not Republican Re-publican > Another serious charge against him was that he was a Catholic and what is more an ultramontane Catholic This is a very grave charge against a man in a Puritan t colony of the type of Plymouth when Roger Williams went forth into the wilderness to find security as well as religion But the last h uuargu 01 all and the one to which most importance in a political sense was at tached was that Montgomery had writ ten a pamphlet in which he arraigned the free school system Of the merits of that pamphlet we me unable to speak never having scott a copy of it Prom what has boon said of it it must have been against tho free school system To bo against tho free school sys I tem in America is to be against America with many It has been thought and maintained by many that the freeschool system was the safeguard of the nation and he was a bold man who dared opix > se that system Such a man was Zachariah Montgomery and a Washington special to the New York 1 u r nU1 tmJI matllontgOll1ery still stands I by his pamphlet and there is nothing in it which he desires to take back This attitude of the new Assistant Attorney General will probably be the end of the charges against him as people do not cure to insist upon charges which may possibly be successfully refuted espec ially when he against whom they are made shows no sinn of backing down but on the contrary shows a bold ag grcssive front It would be interesting to wee the views put forth by Montgomery now that so profound thinker and so liberal a man as Herbert Spencer during his recent visit to this country publicly declared that education was not a universal I uni-versal panacea for political and social evils There can bo no doubt that the free school system where attendance is compulsory is an approach to State socialism that tiling which all Americans dread The free school system touches that question of vital importance I I J I the roaring of the citizenami I whether the State or tho parent has the I more right and Interest in the child land I the manner in which it shall bo I I that is close I roared It is a question upon the boundary line which < divides the I domain of public affairs from the domain of private rights To distinguish between I the two is the task of the statesman for the course of politics is not so logical as the course of a deduction from accepted premises Into politics there enters a term which is never found in logical pre miseshuman nature To know and correctly cor-rectly estimate this human nature and control and guide it in the political field is to be more than a politician it is to be I a statesman |