tes become
so national that one can never lightly resolve to meddle with
them.... There will never be fixity in politics if there is not a
teaching body with fixed principles. As long as people do not from
their infancy learn whether they ought to be republicans or
monarchists, Catholics or sceptics, the State will never form a
nation: it will rest on unsafe and shifting foundations, always
exposed to changes and disorders."

Such being Napoleon's designs, the new University of France was
admirably suited to his purpose. It was not a local university: it was
the sum total of all the public teaching bodies of the French Empire,
arranged and drilled in one vast instructional array. Elementary
schools, secondary schools, _lycees_, as well as the more advanced
colleges, all were absorbed in and controlled by this great teaching
corporation, which was to inculcate the precepts of the Catholic
religion, fidelity to the Emperor and to his Government, as guarantees
for the welfare of the people and the unity of France. For educational
purposes, France was now divided into seventeen Academies, which
formed the local centres of the new institution. Thus, from Paris and
sixteen provincial Academies, instruction was strictly organized and
controlled; and within a short time of its institution (March, 1808),
instruction of all kinds, including that of the elementary schools,
showed some advance. But to all those who look on the unfolding of the
mental and moral faculties as the chief aim of true _education_, the
homely experiments of Pestalozzi offer a far more suggestive and
important field for observation than the barrack-like methods of the
French Emperor. The Swiss reformer sought to train the mind to
observe, reflect, and think; to assist the faculties in attaining
their fullest and freest expression; and thus to add to the richness
and variety of human thought. The French imperial system sought to
prune away all mental independence, and to train the young generation
in neat and serviceable _espalier_ methods: all aspiring shoots,
especially in the sphere of moral and political science, were sharply
cut down. Consequently French thought, which had been the most
ardently speculative in Europe, speedily became vapid and mechanical.

The same remark is proximately true of the literary life of the First
Empire. It soon began to feel the rigorous methods of the Emperor.
Poetry and all other modes