that the young girl learns to know the prerogatives of our sex, and how she should one day choose a husband. Our sex possesses strength, the poor child knows it, and she who is so weak already dreams of directing this strength, or of taming it. All her relations with her father teach her, then, the dependence of woman; but it is a royal de. pendence which causes itself to be served and obeyed. She has recourse to him in all her wants, she leans upon his arm, she rests upon his bosom, she solicits, caresses, and subdues him; one perceives that she has understood her strength at the same time as her weakness, and this early experience acquired in the family will be the lesson of her whole life.

Here concludes what we had to say respecting the influence of the father over the education of children. To him belongs the part of bringing beneath the domestic roof the generous influences of society, and of extending them to the human race. It behoves him to modify by positive virtues that which may be too ideal or too exalted in the lessons of the mother. It is his province to furnish his children with that solid nourishment which, according to St. Paul, is to replace the maternal milk. The mission of fathers is to defend the rights of the family in society, and represent the interests of society in the family circle. They should not isolate themselves either from the one or the other, and their task will be worthily fulfilled if they form for society honest men, and for the country good citizens.

CHAPTER XII.

OF PUBLIC EDUCATION, AND OF A MIXED EDUCATION.

MAN is susceptible of three educations, viz. physical, moral, and intellectual education.

The first was highly estimated in the political institutions of the ancients. Socrates might be seen passing from the gymnasium to the academy, to accustom his limbs to fatigue and his mind to wisdom; holding himself ready to serve his country either as a magistrate or as a warrior.

Among the moderns, gymnastics are no longer a means of defence, it has therefore ceased to be part of the laws of the state. Having become useless by the omnipotence of artillery, it has been too much neglected as a hygienic means. I know not whether historians, or even physiologists, have ever made the remark, and yet it is impossible that a similar revolution could have been effected without inducing evident changes in the physical constitution of

man.

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Next to physical, comes moral education, which we would intrust to maternal tenderness; it is the subject of this book and as regards the education of the intellect, which is the third, it belongs to the professors. Its end is to fertilise thought, whereas the aim of moral education is to vivify the soul, and to call it in to the judgment of our actions.

From these three educations, properly conducted and

maintained in their just proportions, we see man issue complete. Their isolated or superficial developement produces nothing good. A purely physical education tends to elicit the cruelty of the animal or the barbarity of the savage. The two others, exclusively cultivated, may give rise either to religious exaltation and fanaticism, or to the pride of knowledge and to nothingness. The tree of knowledge and the tree of ignorance bear the same fruit.

We will treat of the education of the intellect with reference to the education of the soul. Harmony must be established between them, which is a somewhat difficult matter considering the bad direction given to the studies of youth. It is true that public instruction calls for reform, and that on all sides voices are raised to require freedom of teaching; but this latter method is full of peril, for while it opens a wide field to the progress of thought, it destroys unity of doctrine, the only power which causes empires to last.

Schools, you will say, should be adapted to all opinions, in order that each family may exert its rights. The father has a right to educate his child in the principles which suit him.

To which I would reply by the question: Does there exist no superior right to that of the father?

Fénelon has said that one owes more to one's family than to one's self, more to one's country than to one's family, and more to the human race than to one's country. This generous idea was for a long period only a christian maxim, but which in the soul of Montesquieu became the bond of the political world. "If I knew," said he, 'anything that would be useful to my country, and which was prejudicial to the human race, I should regard it as a crime." This is the manner in which superior minds understand the principle of rights. This application of

the morality of the Gospel to human institutions is the greatest stride which has been made during the last twelve centuries, in that indefinite perfectibility of which we must admit the operation, surrounded as we are by its benefits.

Whoever regards in this question the isolated interest of the father of a family, will retrograde towards the past, and will make himself the advocate of circumscribed and illiberal ideas. The question at the present day is not only that of the personal advantage of the family, it is that of the particular advantage of the country, subject to the general good of humanity. Here the gradation of duties becomes the measure of rights, and in expressing the principle in a more precise manner, I would say, Where duty is, there is right.

In conclusion, education is a public affair; to separate it into particular interests is to disturb the order, to injure the general interests, to organise anarchy for the advantage of despotism. It is a terrible law of Providence, eternal and without exception, that from the crowd of anarchists there always arises a master who flatters and who crushes them, after having taught them to obey.

The rights being recognised, let us come to the application of the principles. What is public instruction? A power which perpetually acts on the political and moral existence of a people.

The definition is simple and precise, it does not even leave to government the right of granting an unlimited liberty; and how could it do so without being wanting to the first of its duties, and giving the people up to all the seductions of an unrestricted licence; to the aberrations and errors of the human mind?

What! shall the superintendence of government be exerted even over the baker, to ascertain the weight and the

quality of the bread destined for our corporeal nourishment, and shall this superintendence stop short at the door of our schools? Can it not assure itself of the amount and the quality of the intellectual food, of the bread of life, which teachers distribute to our children?

To the perils of an unlimited liberty, our adversaries will not fail to oppose the perils of a privileged system of teaching; the routine, the party spirit, the Jesuitism, which was lately so predominant-the moral and religious indifference which predominates at the present day—and the universal demoralization, the consequence of these excesses. We will not attempt to conceal it, these perils are great, they are perhaps as great as the perils of free licence: but what can we conclude from this? Nothing in favour of either system. An equal danger appears to condemn them both, whence it results, that it is not from a law upon public instruction, even were it a good law, that we must seek the remedy for the evil. This remedy will be found in the mixture of the two educations, private and public,—it is there, and there only. This is the anchor of safety amidst the storm.

Let the child receive then as an out-pupil in the colleges, this scholastic instruction to which so much consideration is attached, but which, however, must ere long be reformed; let his intellect be awakened, let his memory be stocked; the soul will be secure, if every evening in the bosom of his family he can hear the voice of his mother, and be influenced by her examples. Thus all reverts to the education of women. We would leave to the colleges

the classical, and the almost mechanical instruction of the intellect, neutralising the vices of this instruction by the sweetest, the most penetrating, and the most durable of all influences.

While a mixed education shields us from the perils of