However, perhaps we shall not be provincialised.  For the Rev. Edward White says that probably, “when all good men alike are placed in a condition of religious equality, and the whole complicated iniquity of Government Church patronage is swept away, more of moral and ennobling influence than ever will be brought to bear upon the action of statesmen.”  We already have an example of religious equality in our colonies.  “In the colonies,” says The Times, “we see religious communities unfettered by [xxvi] State-control, and the State relieved from one of the most troublesome and irritating of responsibilities.”  But America is the great example alleged by those who are against establishments for religion.  Our topic at this moment is the influence of religious establishments on culture; and it is remarkable that Mr. Bright, who has taken lately to representing himself as, above all, a promoter of reason and of the simple natural truth of things, and his policy as a fostering of the growth of intelligence,—­just the aims, as is well known, of culture also,—­Mr. Bright, in a speech at Birmingham about education, seized on the very point which seems to concern our topic, when he said:  “I believe the people of the United States have offered to the world more valuable information during the last forty years than all Europe put together.”  So America, without religious establishments, seems to get ahead of us all in culture and totality; and these are the cure for provincialism.

On the other hand, another friend of reason and the simple natural truth of things, Monsieur Renan, says of America, in a book he has recently published, what seems to conflict violently with [xxvii] what Mr. Bright says.  Mr. Bright affirms that, not only have the United States thus informed Europe, but they have done it without a great apparatus of higher and scientific instruction, and by dint of all classes in America being “sufficiently educated to be able to read, and to comprehend, and to think; and that, I maintain, is the foundation of all subsequent progress.”  And then comes Monsieur Renan, and says:  “The sound instruction of the people is an effect of the high culture of certain classes.  The countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence."* Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to believe?  Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his eye what we ourselves mean by culture; [xxviii] because Mr. Bright always has in his eye what he calls “a commendable interest” in politics and political agitations.  As he said only the other day at Birmingham:  “At this moment,—­in fact, I may say at every moment in the history of a free country,—­there is nothing that is so much worth discussing as politics.”  And he keeps repeating, with all the powers of his