ave, or ought to
have, at Paris. How can you expect that all these youths who have been
at university or conventual schools, with Livy and Quintus Curtius for
their catechism, will not understand liberty like the Gracchi, virtue
like Cato, patriotism like Caesar? How can you expect them not to be
factious and warlike? How can you expect them to take the slightest
interest in the mechanism of our social order? Do you think that their
minds have been prepared to understand it? Do you not see that, in order
to do so, they must get rid of their present impressions, and receive
others entirely opposed to them?

B. What do you conclude from that?

F. I will tell you. The most urgent necessity is, not that the State
should teach, but that it should _allow_ education. All monopolies are
detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.

The Law.

The law perverted! The law--and, in its wake, all the collective forces
of the nation--the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper
direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the
tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law
guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly,
this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to
call the attention of my fellow-citizens.

We hold from God the gift which, as far as we are concerned, contains
all others, Life--physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot support itself. He who has bestowed it, has entrusted us
with the care of supporting it, of developing it, and of perfecting it.
To that end, He has provided us with a collection of wonderful
faculties; He has plunged us into the midst of a variety of elements. It
is by the application of our faculties to these elements, that the
phenomena of assimilation and of appropriation, by which life pursues
the circle which has been assigned to it, are realized.

Existence, faculties, assimilation--in other words, personality,
liberty, property--this is man. It is of these three things that it may
be said, apart from all demagogue subtlety, that they are anterior and
superior to all human legislation.

It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and
property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and
property exist beforehand, that men make laws.

What, then, is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective
organizatio