every man.

But, to secure this end, they say that three changes must be made in the French system. Primary education must be made compulsory, and therefore free and secular; secondary must be so connected with primary and superior that the poor man's son may be able to rise from the first to the third with the least possible difficulty; and in the third place the old narrow conservatism in regard to the subjects taught in the higher schools must be relaxed.

How is the son of a working man or of a farm labourer to reach the highest heights of learning? This question will inevitably meet us in England as soon as we have put our school boards in order and have time to look beyond the barest necessaries of intellectual life. We know that in England it is hard for the labourer's son, handicapped by poverty, to scrape together enough Latin and Greek to win a scholarship at an English college; and the public

schools are too dear for him. How do matters stand on the other side of the Channel? M. Paul Bert is fond of telling how, in a country walk, he picked up a peasant lad by the wayside, found out his talents, and made him use them in gaining a bursary, by means of which he is now studying in a provincial lycée, on his way to the university. On the whole, sheer merit counts for more in France than in England. But even in France the three systems of primary, secondary, and superior are not sufficiently connected, otherwise the intervention of such a special providence as M. Bert, would not have been needed to convey ploughboys to the university. The three systems have by no means been steps of one ladder. By an English standard the fees in a lycée are not high; even in Paris they are, for boarding and tuition, only about 41. per pupil a month for the lowest, and 57. for the highest classes; and the fees are frequently remitted, in the case of the poorer pupils. it is confessedly a rare thing for the very poor to rise from parish school

Still

to lycée. The very programme of the lycée was formerly arranged on the assumption that such a thing could not happen. The lycée is not merely a secondary school. It is meant to give a boy all the education he needs from the time he leaves home to the time he goes to the university, the army, or the "school of arts." The paternal French government prescribes the work to be done in the eight or nine classes of a lycée, as our own lays down the code for the board school. The classes of a lycée are divided into three groups, the elementary division, the division of grammar, and the superior division. In the classes of the first group (IX., VIII., VII.) a boy will learn the three R.'s and something more. He will study his own language, and receive his first introductions to history and geography. In the division of grammar (classes VI., V., IV.) he will learn. Latin, Greek, with English or German, while he continues to study the three R.s and his own language. It is a virtue of all French schools that they train the scholar well in French. At the end of 66 grammar" a boy may, if he likes, pass an examination and receive a certificate in grammar, qualifying him, e.g. to begin his studies for some of the inferior medical appointments. But, if he thinks of the university, he goes on to the superior group of school classes (III., II., and I.), where he gains a minuter knowledge of ancient and modern languages, history, and geography, and adds a little philosophy. If he is not to be a man of law or of letters, he may substitute scientific studies for some of the advanced literary subjects of the programme; and the lycée is often connected with a 66 preparatory school which gives a training for special professions.

This is the case, for example, with the Parisian Lycée St. Louis, from which most of the above features have been taken. But in truth a French lycée, whether it be in Paris, Lyons, or Boulogne, in Doubs, La

Vendée, or Algeria, is essentially the same institution, working after the same plan, and obeying the same rules. There is no "bazaar" of secondary schools in democratic France, as in aristocratic England; there is a single type. To understand how these schools are related to the "Faculties" of the university, we have only to think of the relation between the university and the colleges in Oxford or Cambridge. Suppose the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge to be elementary as well as secondary in their instruction; suppose boys to enter them at ten or eleven, and leave at eighteen or nineteen; suppose the discipline of school instead of the liberty of college-life; and lastly suppose the colleges to be scattered up and down the country and even over the colonies, instead of being congregated in one town ;-that would be a near approach to the system of secondary education in France. The "Faculties" of the university, the several professors of law, language, philosophy, and science, throughout the country are the common Board of Examiners, who examine the pupils of the lycées for their Bachelor's, Licentiate's, Associate's, or Doctor's degree. The expression "University of France,' has, it is true, a wide sense; it means rather an Education Department, the Department of Secondary Education, than a learned body; and, as such, it includes the lycées as well as the institutions which we in this country would call Universities. But, as there are lycées all over France, so there

are

"Faculties" of the University, groups of University professors, in all the chief towns. Their lectures are free as air; they are open to all, without distinction of age, sex, rank, fortune, or qualification. Luckily or unluckily, they have seldom any near bearing on a student's work for his degree, and he is under no necessity to attend them. It would be interesting to know what proportion of bond-fide students fill the lecture-room of M. Caro, M. Rénan, or M. Beaulieu. But it is well that those whose education has

been neglected in early life should have so pleasant an opportunity of remedying the neglect in their riper years. Knowledge cannot be made too cheap.

Let us, however, go down the ladder again, in order to see whether the poor man's son can ever make his way up to a university degree. The present authorities are removing one or two obstacles in his way. For the future, if he does not draw the Marshal's baton out of his knapsack, it is to be his own fault. Till very recently it was not possible for a boy to resume his studies, on entering the lycée, at the exact point where he had stopped them on leaving his own parish school. He learned no Latin at the parish school; and if he came to the lycée and wished to begin Latin from the beginning, he must be put back to the eighth class, which in all other subjects would be too elementary for him. The remedy has been found in the deferring of Latin till the fifth class of the lycée; and steps are being taken to develop the system of bursaries and scholarships, so that poor boys may have abundant facilities for passing from Board School to High School. Perhaps our English remedy would have been not to defer Latin in the lycée, but to introduce it in the elementary school. But the French draw a hard and fast line between primary and secondary education. No subject is taught in the primary schools that is not deemed absolutely necessary for all citizens; and all the subjects that are to be studied by a boy at school are introduced to him in his very first year. Reading, writing, arithmetic, French grammar, French history, and general geography, these six studies make up the entire literary programme. The child receives in his first year a sketch which he fills up. in detail during the later years. The difference between the first and the third year simply between an elementary and a complete way of treating the same subject. These main outlines are the code for all primary schools. Nothing

is

is fixed and rigid, however, except the main outlines. The primary system of education in France is on the whole a system of local self-government. Within the bounds of the general programme, each department may fix the books and subjects for its own schools in its own way. There is an Organisation Pédagogique des Écoles Publiques du Département de la Seine, and similar local codes for the other eighty-six departments of France. Our neighbours are at present in somewhat the same critical position in which we found ourselves in 1870, when Mr. Forster's Act was passed. They are adopting great changes in popular education, and they are fully alive to the difficulties of the question. Some of our English solutions they reject very emphatically. M. Buisson, the writer of a small pamphlet, L'Instruction Primaire en Angleterre, which caused some stir last year in educational circles, condemns our system of "grants' or "payment by results," as "encouraging both among teachers and among parents a mercenary spirit, little adapted to raise the intellectual level of the English masses." The French way of rewarding a good teacher is to promote him from a provincial school to a Parisian, or to make him an inspector. A more important difference at the present crisis is in the treatment of religion in the school. Till now, the French schools, primary and secondary, have been far more demonstratively religious than our own. Thousands of their teachers have been clerical; and the crucifix and the Virgin have been included, with tables, chairs, and clocks, as part of the ordinary furniture of a school. Only a few months ago M. Hérold, the Prefect of the Seine, gave general offence, and brought on Gambetta's Government a not undeserved censure from the Senate, by sweeping all these emblems out of the primary schools of Paris in a foolish fit of iconoclasm. But, "if that in the green tree, what in the dry?" The present change in the law

will go beyond M. Hérold; it will exclude even the English "time-table." The experiment of a purely secular education is about to be made by a nation which, unhappily, shows no great desire for anything beyond it. However un- -Roman our creed, we cannot regard it as clear gain to France to have dismissed from her schools the enthusiasm and energy of her countless clerical teachers of both sexes. Our best consolation is, perhaps, to look at the enthusiasm of the lay teachers in Paris and Lyons, who conduct the nightly classes of the Association Philotechnique, the Association Polytechnique, or the Union Française de la Jeunesse. These are voluntary associations of educated people, many of them wealthy and in office, who do not grudge to transform themselves into unpaid amateur teachers of adult ignoramuses.

They

have brought knowledge within the reach of thousands who were never on speaking terms with their schoolmaster; and they are living proofs of the affinity between enlightenment and democracy. The societies themselves are the offspring of popular Revolutions. The political zeal of 1830, overflowing into an educational channel, produced the Association Polytechnique. The Philotechnique, which dates from 1848, and the Union Française, which dates from 1875, had a similar origin. It would be absurd to look on these simple societies as the salvation of France: but they are useful as pointing out where the hope may lie. They point to a store of humanitarian enthusiasm, which has survived the most extreme scepticism in theology, and preserved the essence of Christian charity. A nation whose "better classes" are of this mind has a heart as well as a head. Even if at present it seem to wish for no religion at all, it has the stuff out of which religion is made; and a time may come when it will be more guided by visions of goodness than by phantoms of glory.

JAMES BONar.