rs to a style of living beyond your means and theirs! In the
first place, it is very bad for your purse; in the second place it
develops a contemptuous spirit in the very bosom of the family. If you
dress your children like little lords, and give them to understand that
they are superior to you, is it astonishing if they end by disdaining
you? You will have nourished at your table the declassed--a product
which costs dear and is worthless.

Any fashion of instructing children whose most evident result is to
lead them to despise their parents and the customs and activities among
which they have grown up, is a calamity. It is effective for nothing but
to produce a legion of malcontents, with hearts totally estranged from
their origin, their race, their natural interests--everything, in short,
that makes the fundamental fabric of a man. Once detached from the
vigorous stock which produced them, the wind of their restless ambition
drives them over the earth, like dead leaves that will in the end be
heaped up to ferment and rot together.

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds, but by an evolution slow
and certain. In preparing a career for our children, let us imitate her.
Let us not confound progress and advancement with those violent
exercises called somersaults. Let us not so bring up our children that
they will come to despise work and the aspirations and simple spirit of
their fathers: let us not expose them to the temptation of being ashamed
of our poverty if they themselves come to fortune. A society is indeed
diseased when the sons of peasants begin to feel disgust for the fields,
when the sons of sailors desert the sea, when the daughters of
working-men, in the hope of being taken for heiresses, prefer to walk
the streets alone rather than beside their honest parents. A society is
healthy, on the contrary, when each of its members applies himself to
doing very nearly what his parents have done before him, but doing it
better, and, looking to future elevation, is content first to fulfill
conscientiously more modest duties.[C]

[C] This would be the place to speak of work in general, and of its
tonic effect upon education. But I have discussed the subject in my
books _Justice_, _Jeunesse_, and _Vaillanos_. I must limit myself to
referring the reader to them.

* * * * *

Education should make independent men. If you wish to train your
children for liberty, bring them up simply, and do