Because science applied to manufactures will, in a few years, increase a hundredfold the prosperity of the nation, the wealth of the State, and the resources of power.
Because the discoveries of pure science, good books, and all the higher productions of the mind, even when they are not sources of material profit, are an honour to a country, the splendour of an age, and the glory of a Sovereign.
All the princes in Europe, with the single exception of the Pope, limit their views to the things of the earth; and they do wisely.
Without raising a doubt as to a future existence in another and a better world, they govern their subjects only with regard to this life.

They seek to obtain for them all the happiness of which man is capable here below; they labour to render him as perfect as he can be as long as he retains this poor "mortal coil." We should regard them as _mauvais plaisants_ if they were to think it their duty to make for us the trials of Job, while showing us a future prospect of eternal bliss.
But the fact is that our emperors and kings and lay sovereigns are men with wives and children, personally interested in the education of the rising generation, and the future of their people.

A good Pope, on the contrary, has no other object but to gain Heaven himself, and to drag up a hundred and thirty millions of men after him.

Thus it is that his subjects can with an ill grace ask of him those temporal advantages which secular princes feel bound to offer their subjects spontaneously.
In the Papal States the schools for the lower classes are both few and far between.

The government does nothing to increase either their number or their usefulness, the parishes being obliged to maintain them; and even this source is sometimes cut off, for not unfrequently the minister disallows this heading in the municipal budget, and pockets the money himself.