many expressions of approval
from foreigners competent to form a judgment on the subject. In the
following pages we propose giving a succinct account of the actual
system and position of primary and secondary education in France,
speaking of what has been done since the close of the war in 1871, and
of what yet remains to be done.

PRIMARY EDUCATION.

The great crying evil in France is the lack of education among the
poorer classes, who nevertheless, by the democratic constitution of
their country, are called upon, together with the rich and the middle
classes, to take their share in the government. This evil is recognized
in France, and each fresh Assembly meets at Versailles with the
determination of having primary schools built and of having every child
taught at least to read and write. But these good intentions are
terribly hampered by the all-absorbing military appropriations, which,
swallowing up some 500,000,000 francs annually, do not allow the
ministers and deputies, well disposed as they are, to appropriate to the
education of all France a sum much exceeding that expended by the single
State of Pennsylvania in the same cause. Still, the acknowledgment of
the existence of the evil is in itself a great step toward remedying it,
and the France of to-day is making progress in this respect. Before the
last war, instead of saying with Terence,

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto,

the French citizen might rather have cried, "I am a _Frenchman_, and
that which is not French is foreign to me." A salutary reaction has set
in since the war, and nothing is more common than to hear Frenchmen
observe that their country was conquered not by Moltke or Krupp, but
rather by the German _Schullehrer_.

We shall not enter into the merits of the long-standing dispute in
France as to the superiority of secular or of clerical education. The
parable of the mote and the beam might probably be applicable to both
parties, but no impartial observer can fail to recognize that the
triumph of Romanism in France, consequent upon the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, has formed one of the chief obstacles to the
development of public education in that country. Huss, Luther,
Calvin--in a word, all the leaders of the Reformation--inculcated the
sacred duty devolving upon every man of reading the Bible for himself in
his own tongue. Hence we now find education far more advanced in
Protestant than in Catholic countries--a fact