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which has not a little contributed to the decadence of the Latin races. Richelieu, who held that a hungry people was the most submissive, was also of opinion that an ignorant people obeyed the most readily. Louis XIV. and Louis XV., without saying as much, acted up to the cardinal's maxim, doing absolutely nothing for popular education. The instruction of the upper classes was at that time in the hands of religious societies or _congregations_. The Revolution, displaying its usual iconoclastic zeal, upset this system, without reflecting for a moment that it might be as well to substitute some other system for it, and that it takes time to organize a body of teachers fit to undertake such a work. The Convention decreed that those parents should be punished who did not send their children to school, overlooking the fact that there were no schools to send them to. It proclaimed gratuitous instruction, but made no provision for the salaries of the teachers. These hastily instituted reforms were eminently characteristic of the feverish excitement amidst which matters affecting the most serious interests of the nation were disposed of. The First Empire and the Restoration saw but little done on behalf of primary education. Under Louis Philippe the question of gratuitous instruction and compulsory attendance got no farther, notwithstanding the fact of such men being in power as Victor Cousin, Villemain and Guizot. The efforts of Jules Simon and of Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire to have the question settled by the Republican government in 1848 proved futile. Napoleon III., having found 44,000 schools in France at the commencement of his reign, left it with 54,000 at its close--a most insignificant rate of increase, as regards primary instruction, compared with the advances made in the same direction by foreign nations, and with the material progress of France itself during those eighteen eventful years. The Third Republic has, as was observed above, given to the question of education a prominent place among the reforms to be instituted. Scarcely had the most pressing financial and military questions been dealt with ere a searching examination into the educational system of the country was undertaken and its defects laid bare. In a report on primary and secondary education in different countries, read by M. Levasseur before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on the 29th of May, 1875, he establishes the fact that out of forty
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