at Montpelier, France, in Seventeen Hundred
Ninety-eight. His father was receiver of taxes, an office that carried
with it much leisure and a fair income. Men of leisure seldom have time
to think--if you want a thing done it is safest and best not to pick a
publican. Only busy men have time to do things. The men who have good
incomes and work little are envied only by those with a mental
impediment.

The boy Auguste owed little to his parents for his peculiar evolution,
save as his father taught him by antithesis: the children of drunkards
make temperance fanatics, and shiftless fathers sometimes have sons who
are great financiers.

When nine years of age, the passion to know and to become was upon
Auguste Comte. He was small in stature, insignificant in appearance, and
had a great appetite for facts. Comte is a fine refutation of the maxim
that infant prodigies fall victims to arrested development.

At twelve years of age he was filled with the idea that the social order
was all wrong. To the utter astonishment of his parents and tutors, he
argued that the world could not be bettered until mankind was taught the
lesson that history, languages, theology and polite etiquette were not
learning at all; and as long as educated men centered on these things,
there was no hope for the race.

The birch was brought in to disannex the boy from his foolishness, but
this only seemed to make him cling the closer to what he was pleased to
call his convictions.

He read books that wearied the brains of grown-ups, and took a hearty
interest in the abstruse, the obscure and the complex.

At thirteen, that peculiar time when the young turn to faith, this
perverse rareripe was so filled with doubt that it ran over and he stood
in the slop. He offered to publicly debate the question of Freewill with
the local cure; and on several occasions stood up in meeting and
contradicted the preacher.

His parents, thinking to divert his mind from abstractions to useful
effort, sent him to the Polytechnic School at Paris, that excellent
institution founded by Napoleon, which served America most nobly as a
model for the Boston School of Technology, only the French
"Polytechnique" was purely a government institution--a sample of the
Twentieth Century sent for the benefit of the Nineteenth.

But institutions are never much beyond the people--they can not be, for
the people dilute everything until it is palatable. Laws that do not
embody public