d arithmetic, to giving to these just the necessary time, at the
right season, three months for two or three winters, to keep his
twelve-year-old daughter at home to help her mother and take care of the
other children, to keep his boy of ten years for pasturing cattle or for
goading on the oxen at the plow.[6399] In relation to his children and
their interests as well as for his own necessities, he is suspect, he is
not a good judge; the State has more light and better intentions than he
has. Consequently, the State has the right to constrain him and in fact,
from above, from Paris, the State does this. Legislators, as formerly in
1793, have acted according to Jacobin procedure, as despotic theorists.
They have formed in their minds a uniform, universal, simple type, that
of a child from six to thirteen years as they want to see it, without
adjusting the instruction they impose on it to its prospective
condition, making abstraction of his positive and personal interest, of
his near and certain future, setting the father aside, the natural
judge and competent measurer of the education suitable to his son and
daughter, the sole authorized arbiter for determining the quality,
duration, circumstances and counterpoise of the mental and moral
manipulation to which these young lives, inseparable from his own, are
going to be subject away from home.--Never, since the Revolution,
has the State so vigorously affirmed its omnipotence, nor pushed in
encroachments on and intrusion into the proper domain of the individual
so far, even to the very center of domestic life. Note that in 1793
and 1794 the plans of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau and of Saint-Just
remained on paper; the latter for ten years have been in practical
operation.[63100]

At bottom, the Jacobin is a sectarian, propagator of his own faith, and
hostile to the faith of others. Instead of admitting that that people's
conceptions are different and rejoicing that there are so many of them,
each adapted to the human group which believes in it, and essential to
believers to help them along, he admits but one, his own, and he
uses power to force it upon adherents. He also has his own creed,
his catechism, his imperative formula, and he imposes them.--
Henceforth,[63101] education shall be not only free and obligatory but
again secular and nothing but secular. Thus far, the great majority of
parents, most of the fathers and all of the mothers, were desirous that
it should at