capable of standing even by Turgot to the end, he
carried on an extensive correspondence with curates in Artois as well as
in the other provinces of France, as the best means of educating the
people to an intelligent appreciation of his purposes and of his plans.
Condorcet, who treated the brutal murderers of the Duc de la
Rochefoucauld with a complaisance which entitles him to the confidence
of the most advanced anti-clerical philosophers of our own day, bears
witness to the good intentions of Turgot's correspondents. He says, in
his memoir of Turgot, printed at Philadelphia seven years before the
Revolution of '89, that 'the curates, accustomed to preach sound morals,
to appease the quarrels of the people, and to encourage peace and
concord, were in a better position than any other men in France to
prepare the minds of the people for the good work it was the intents of
the ministers to do.'

What was true of the French curates a hundred years ago is true of them
to-day, the duties prescribed to them by the Church being still
precisely what they were when Condorcet bore this testimony to the good
dispositions of men much more conscientious than himself. Then, too, as
now, the curates were required to look carefully after the education of
the children in their parishes. France is indebted, not to the
Revolution, but to a great Protestant historian and statesman, Guizot,
and to King Louis Philippe for the foundation of her system of public
education. The revolutionists of 1789 left the country worse off in this
matter than they found it. The royal ordinance of Louis XIV. in 1698,
which required the establishment of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses
in every parish in which they were not then to be found, and fixed the
salaries to be paid these masters and mistresses out of a public tax in
every parish in which no foundations for their support existed, was
distinctly a public-school law. This ordinance made it incumbent upon
all parents and other persons who had charge of children to send them to
the schools until they were fourteen years of age, and it also enjoined
upon the curates the duty of 'watching with particular attention over
the education of the children in their respective parishes.' The spirit
in which the clergy of Artois, at least, discharged this duty appears in
an ordinance of the Bishop of Arras issued in 1740, half a century
before the Revolution of 1789, in which the bishop lays it down as a
maxim tha