number of children who, in 1850, were growing up in ignorance; and instances, among other similar examples, the arrondissement of St. Quentin, in which, out of nineteen thousand one hundred and eighty children of an age to attend the Primary Schools, seven thousand five hundred and eighty were without any instruction whatsoever. But, as already remarked, although more ample funds are needed to place the Primary Instruction of the country on a level with the needs of the population, great progress has been effected within the last ten years; and I am assured by a gentleman occupying an official position in this department of the public service, that five-sixths, at least, of the juvenile population of France attend the schools, with more or less constancy, at the present day. The Primary Schools constitute the first and lowest branch of the governmental system of Public Instruction which we have now passed in review. The important institutions of the Salles d'Asile (Infant Schools) and of the Crêches (Day Nurseries for Infants) are of exclusively Municipal origin, and are placed under the immediate management of the local authorities, subject, however, to the general regulation and inspection of the State. But many of the warmest

friends and supporters of the former are desirous to see them recognised by the State as constituting the first degree of the educational career, and included as such in the general educational system of the country.

Paris, 1858.

ANNA BLACKWELL.

The only changes worth noticing that have been introduced into the Public Schools of France during the two years which have elapsed since the foregoing sketch of "Education in France" was written, are as follows:

First, The suppression of the second class of Supplementary Teachers in the Communal Schools for Boys, at a salary of sixteen pounds per annum; all such Supplementary Teachers being now included in one class, and receiving a salary of twenty pounds per

annum.

Second, The appointment, for the first time, of Supplementary Teachers in the Communal Schools for Girls, and the consequent introduction of the Simultaneous System of teaching into the higher classes of these schools; the Mutual System being now confined to their elementary classes.

A slight increase has also been made in the salaries of the Teachers of these schools throughout the country, and a more considerable one in those of Paris, where the head mistress may now receive from eighty to one hundred and twenty pounds per annum; and the supplementary teachers from forty-eight to fifty-six pounds per annum, with an addition of eight pounds per annum, until they become head-mistresses in their turn.

The payments due from the parents of the pupils in these schools

which, in some localities, constitute an important portion of the mistress's salary, and which she herself was formerly obliged to collect, more or less successfully, are now collected by the Municipal taxgatherers of each commune, whose authorities are thus made responsible for that portion of the mistress's salary not paid by the State. Third, Of the five classes of Inspectors of Primary Schools, with salaries ranging from forty-eight to eighty pounds per annum, two classes have been abolished; the salaries of the three existing classes now ranging from sixty-four to eighty-eight pounds per

annum.

Fourth, Re-establishment of the office of Resident - Inspector of Primary Schools in the chef-lieu of each Department, abolished, from motives of economy, in 1854, to the great inconvenience of all concerned.

I had hoped to have terminated this sketch by a statement of the exact number of pupils now in attendance at the various Schools of France, a general school-census having been undertaken, by order of the French Government, at the time when this sketch was prepared. It is supposed that at least five-sixths of the children and youth of France attend its schools; but this fact cannot be stated with absolute certainty. The census in question is now completed, and its returns are safely lodged in the bureaux of the Minister of Public Instruction; but the Government, unwilling to incur the expense of reducing to order this mass of returns, has suspended the labors of the Commission appointed for that purpose, which thus remain for the present without any definite result.

The duplicates of the various Public Libraries of Paris are being employed, in virtue of a recent order of the Minister of Public Instruction, in the formation of popular libraries for the use of the laboring classes, in connection with the Communal Schools, in the different quarters of the capital.

1860.

A. B.

Having allowed my friend, Miss Blackwell, full expression of her opinion concerning the moral action of the Clerical Schools of France, I feel that justice demands my stating that my own impressions are widely different. I have lately spent five weeks in Paris for the express purpose of investigating the educational and other charities of that metropolis; and am convinced that the schools kept by the Sisters of Charity are a most important item in their wide-spread usefulness. At any rate I would suggest to all English ladies who visit Paris, that a more interesting and less understood field of sight-seeing than that afforded by the charities of Paris does not exist, and that it is absolutely necessary that they should know a little of the methods by which the lower classes in the sister country are aided, if they wish to deal wisely and according to the results of experience with

our own.

B. R. P.

VOL. V

2B

LIV.-MADAME SWETCHINE.

(Concluded from page 314.)

In our last number we reviewed the life of Madame Swetchine during the thirty-four years which she spent in her native Russia. But one of those moments was fast approaching for her, in which the arbitrary will of a despotic sovereign can turn the whole current of an individual career, and cause it to flow on far apart from its original destination. General Swetchine was not, strictly speaking, exiled; but a party was formed against him at court, and a fault committed by one of his subalterns was dexterously attributed to him; he found that his enemies were gaining ground against him, and taking alarm at his false position, and unwilling to risk his pride by running the chances of enforced exile, he took the resolution • of quitting Russia on his own accord. His wife, who had recently quitted the Greek communion, under which, as the national religion of Russia, she had been educated, and become a member of the Roman Catholic church, was likewise an object of dislike and suspicion to the followers of the Greek Patriarch about the court, and her departure caused much satisfaction. The Czar, undecided, and deceived by those about him, showed his personal regrets at losing her, by asking her to correspond with him during her travels. Alexander's mind, always ardent and unsettled, had been long under the influence of the mystical Madame de Krüdener, a woman who believed she had special revelations from heaven; his intimate friends adhered to the equally mystical sects which found footing iu those days in Germany; some among them placed all their trust in societies for the diffusion of the Scriptures, without wishing for any ecclesiastical organisation; others rushed into a contrary extreme, and thought that the regeneration of Russia was to be developed out of the action of the Masonic Lodges! But this confusion of influences did not hinder Alexander from relying in intimate personal friendship on Madame Swetchine, whose moderate and well-balanced intellectual powers, naturally colored by her early affinities among the French refugees, pursued both in religion and politics the middle course suggested by the circumstances in which she was born and bred. Her correspondence with Alexander lasted until his death: she kept with precious care the Emperor's letters, and he bestowed the same respect on hers. On his death, either in accordance with his expressed will, or by the delicate kindness of the Emperor Nicholas, Madame Swetchine's letters were sent to her at Paris, and in 1845 she showed the entire double correspondence to a friend; but, as no sign of it appeared among her papers after her death, it is feared they were burnt by precaution in 1848.

In quitting Russia, the general and his wife appeared scarcely to

have contemplated perpetual exile; that Madame Swetchine should delight in the idea of European travel, now first rendered possible by the peace, was natural to a woman of her intellectual cast; but that her imagination still clung to the hope of returning home eventually, is shown by the following note written to M. Tourguenief on the brink of her departure. "My dear friend," it runs, "here I am again with my everlasting supplications; but I leave so many unfortunates behind me, that any assistance is sure to be available to one or other among them. Do me the kindness to give some attention to them, and support your courage, if it is ready to sink, by reflecting that in spite of myself I shall very soon leave you quiet. Ah! my dear friend, if I had no other link to my native country than the poor and the little children whom I leave behind me, that link would still be stronger than anything which could give me pleasure in foreign lands. The feeling which I constantly experience on this point is the best guarantee of the tendency which will perhaps bring me home again even sooner than I expect."

It was at the commencement of the winter of 1816-17, that Madame Swetchine arrived in Paris, having travelled with little détour from St. Petersburgh. She was at that time thirty-four years of age, in the prime of her intellectual force, and at the epoch which she was particularly fitted to comprehend and sympathise with-that of the Restoration. It is not very easy to give the English reader a fair comprehension of the moral and social problems which henceforth occupied this remarkable mind, because Madame Swetchine's stand-point was so very different from anything we can well conceive. She certainly was not illiberal in any sense of the word; she took the deepest interest in the condition of the people, and was accustomed to spend time and trouble and her own uncertain personal strength in efforts to help and to instruct others. We have seen that she could be wise and thoughtful about her little protégé, and that she wrote letter after letter to men high in office whenever they could assist her in her plans. She took a profound interest in the serfs who came to her by inheritance, and did her best by them, and she appears to have been singularly wideminded and free from prejudices. But she had never in her life seen even the shadow of a liberal institution. Born and bred in the Russian court, the early sympathies with freedom, which she had imbibed from her father and his friends, had been stained, as it were, with the blood of the French revolution. It was next to impossible for good people in that generation to imagine popular liberty as anything but the distorted phantom of the Place de Grève. Neither the years of anarchy and bloodshed, nor the supreme despotism of Napoleon, appeared to have left fruit in which the true lovers of their race could rejoice: the wrecks of the tempest yet strewed the devastated fields, the forest trees which had grown for ages were all uprooted and thrown out to wither, and twenty-five years

VOL. V.

2B 2

of convulsion or of battle in all parts of Europe had left to the partisans of despotism and liberalism but little distinction in their cause for mourning. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Madame Swetchine should entertain sincere hopes of the results of the restored Bourbon rule. That at least had root in the noblest traditions of France; that, if it could be guided by the freer spirit of the age and by the lessons learnt in exile, possessed an organic raison d'être. It is all very well for the English, than whom no people are more firmly linked in practical ways to their own historical past, to fling themselves theoretically on the opposite side, and imagine it possible to reconstitute the moral life of a people by the creating and carrying out of a new constitution; the new constitution may be excellent, but it has one capital defect, it will not work, or at least it will not work with the particular human material for which it was arbitrarily designed. It is exactly parallel to imposing an external rule of good conduct on an ill-educated, ill-disciplined adult; the man will not or cannot obey. If in England at the present moment all our traditions were uprooted; if the throne were vacant, or filled by a military general like Marlborough or Wellington; if the irregular boundaries of our dear old English counties were all straightened, and the land cut up into square or oblong departments, so that the names of Northumberland and Kent ceased to be familiar in the mouths of men; if the local centres of national life, Gloucester and Birmingham, Manchester and York, the relics of antiquity and the resorts of modern trade, were alike held down by armed force or checked by the incessant action of a centralised police; if a population which had escaped from provincial massacres or metropolitan civil murder, were decimated by military levies in the flower of their age, and no man knew who would reign or what would happen next,-then we can conceive that even Lord John Russell might welcome the advent of a Stuart or a Tudor as one fixed point amidst the chaos, and that a fixed inheritance from a tomb in Westminster Abbey would seem a point from which the wholesome liberty of a distracted country might in the course of long years be evolved. And so it was that many wise and noble hearts, by no means indifferent to the truest welfare of their fellows, rejoiced in the fresh re-blossoming of the Fleur-de-Lys,

in the unfurling of the oriflamme of St. Louis of France once more; and is it for us, for us who in 1860 see a far more rigid and rootless despotism established in the Tuileries, and Paris degraded by a court which possesses neither the poetry of tradition nor the ardent and pious charity of many of Madame Swetchine's personal friends among the old régime, to say that those who hoped much from the restoration of the ancient monarchy were blindly and wholly wrong?

Her residence in Paris was not immediately permanent; the machinations of enemies at the court of St. Petersburgh caused her husband to go back for about a year; but in 1818 he returned once more to Paris, and never to the end of his life visited Russia again.