which has not a little
contributed to the decadence of the Latin races. Richelieu, who held
that a hungry people was the most submissive, was also of opinion that
an ignorant people obeyed the most readily. Louis XIV. and Louis XV.,
without saying as much, acted up to the cardinal's maxim, doing
absolutely nothing for popular education. The instruction of the upper
classes was at that time in the hands of religious societies or
_congregations_. The Revolution, displaying its usual iconoclastic zeal,
upset this system, without reflecting for a moment that it might be as
well to substitute some other system for it, and that it takes time to
organize a body of teachers fit to undertake such a work. The
Convention decreed that those parents should be punished who did not
send their children to school, overlooking the fact that there were no
schools to send them to. It proclaimed gratuitous instruction, but made
no provision for the salaries of the teachers. These hastily instituted
reforms were eminently characteristic of the feverish excitement amidst
which matters affecting the most serious interests of the nation were
disposed of. The First Empire and the Restoration saw but little done on
behalf of primary education. Under Louis Philippe the question of
gratuitous instruction and compulsory attendance got no farther,
notwithstanding the fact of such men being in power as Victor Cousin,
Villemain and Guizot.

The efforts of Jules Simon and of Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire to have the
question settled by the Republican government in 1848 proved futile.
Napoleon III., having found 44,000 schools in France at the commencement
of his reign, left it with 54,000 at its close--a most insignificant
rate of increase, as regards primary instruction, compared with the
advances made in the same direction by foreign nations, and with the
material progress of France itself during those eighteen eventful years.
The Third Republic has, as was observed above, given to the question of
education a prominent place among the reforms to be instituted. Scarcely
had the most pressing financial and military questions been dealt with
ere a searching examination into the educational system of the country
was undertaken and its defects laid bare. In a report on primary and
secondary education in different countries, read by M. Levasseur before
the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on the 29th of May, 1875, he
establishes the fact that out of forty