nder the
conflicting influences of Flemish, Spanish, and French laws and customs,
a genuine development of social and political life may be traced as
clearly as in Scotland or in England, down to the sudden and violent
strangulation of French progress by the incompetent States-General and
the not less incompetent king in 1789.

The archives of Aire show that the question of public education was a
practical question there, at least as far back as at the beginning of
the seventeenth century. In 1613, the magistrates asked and obtained the
permission of the Archduke Albert and the Archduchess Isabella to lay a
special tax on the city of Aire and two adjoining villages, for the
purpose of founding a college, private citizens having already given an
endowment of 750 florins a year for this object. The importance of this
contribution may be estimated from the fact that after the siege of Aire
by the French in 1641, a sum of I,000 florins left to the Collegiate
Church of Aire by a canon of Tournay was found sufficient to restore the
chapel of Our Lady, the whole right wing of the church, and many houses
belonging to the canons, which had all been destroyed by the French
artillery. No time was lost in opening the college to the youth of the
city and the suburbs, and only a few years afterwards the priests in
charge of it wrote to the Seigneur de Thiennes, asking for further
endowments in order to increase the number of the teachers to twenty, so
great was the affluence of scholars from all the country around, 'to the
number at that time of more than three hundred.' The collegiate chapter
of Aire appointed one of its canons superintendent of the school, under
the title of the 'Ecolatre.' There really seems to be as little
foundation in fact for the common notion that there was no provision
made for the education of the people in France before 1789, as for the
notion, not less common, that there were no peasant proprietors in
France before 1789. It is hardly excusable even that Mr. Carlyle,
rhapsodising more than fifty years ago about the 'dumb despairing
millions,' should have fallen into this error. For though De Tocqueville
and Taine had not then exploded it in detail, Necker, in whose career
Carlyle took so much interest, not only declared officially that there
was 'an immense number' of such proprietors in France, but took the
trouble to explain how it had come about. The law of 1790 establishing
the land-tax required every