The parties in Switzerland are fortunately not divided by questions of race or religion, but the pasteur owned that the Catholics were a difficult element, and had to be carefully managed. They include the whole population of the Italian cantons, and part of the French and German. In Geneva and other large towns the labor question troublesomely enters, and the radicals, like our Democrats, are sometimes the retrograde party.
The pasteur spoke with smiling slight of the Père Hyacinthe and the Döllinger movements, and he confessed that the Protestants were cut up into too many sects to make progress among the Catholic populations. The Catholics often keep their children out of the public schools, as they do with us, but these have to undergo the State examinations, to which all the children, whether taught at home or in private schools, must submit. He deplored the want of moral instruction in the public schools, but he laughed at the attempts in France to instil non-religious moral principles: when I afterwards saw this done in the Florentine ragged schools I could not feel that he was altogether right.

License information: nan
MPAA: PG
Go to source: http://www.online-literature.com/william-dean-howells/swiss-sojourn/