ical
defeat, to hostilities. Now, the chances are, that, should hostile
rulers, in this case, attempt to strike it in its most vulnerable point,
that of teaching, they might set aside liberty, and even toleration, and
adopt the school machine of Napoleon in order to restore it as best they
could, enlarge it, derive from it for their own profit and against the
Church, whatever could be got out of it, to use with all their power
according to the principles and intentions of the Convention and the
Directory. Thus, the compromise accepted by Church and State is simply
a provisional truce; to-morrow, this truce will be broken; the fatal
French prejudice which erects the State into a national educator is ever
present; after a partial and brief slackening of its energy, it will try
to recover its ascendancy and recommence its ravages.--And, on the other
hand, even under this regime, more liberal than its predecessor, real
liberty is much restricted; instead of one monopoly, there are two.
Between two kinds of establishments, one secular, resembling a barracks,
and the other ecclesiastical, resembling a seminary or convent, parents
may choose and that is all. Ordinarily, if they prefer one, it is not
because they consider it good, but because, in their opinion, the other
is worse, while there is no third one at hand, built after a different
type, with its own independent and special character, adapting itself to
their tastes and accommodating itself to their necessities.

In the early years of the century there were thousands of secondary
schools of every kind and degree, everywhere born or reborn,
spontaneous, local, raised up through the mutual understanding of
parents and masters, and, consequently, subject to this understanding,
diverse, flexible, dependent on the law of supply and demand,
competitive, each careful to keep its own patrons, each compelled, like
every other private enterprise, to adjust its working to the views and
faculties of its clients. It is very probable that, if these had been
allowed to exist, if the new legislator had not been radically hostile
to permanent corporations, endowments, and mortmain titles; if, through
the jealous intervention of his Council of State and the enormous
levies of his fiscal system, the government had not discouraged free
associations and the free donations to which they might have been
entitled, the best of these secondary schools would have survived: those
which might have