ral
regions of the United States down to the second quarter of the current
century. In many French parishes of the sixteenth century the
schoolmaster 'boarded around' in the different families of the parish,
just as he did in New England. The religious wars again disturbed the
development of education. At Nimes, where the archives I found had been
carefully investigated by M. Puech, more than a third of the artisans
could read, write, and keep their accounts at the end of the fifteenth
century. After the close of the religious wars, it was no uncommon thing
to find fathers signing their names in a very clerkly fashion, while
their sons were forced to 'make their marks,' as being unable to write.
Like causes produced like effects at the end of the eighteenth century.
Not content with disestablishing the Church, the legislative tinkers of
1791, by a law passed on June 27 in that year, struck out of existence
at a blow all the great industrial associations and corporations of
France. These had provided for the education of the children of their
members for centuries; but all the educational foundations were swept
away with the hospitals and the charities. The men who grew to man's
estate between 1793 and 1813 in France grew up in greater ignorance than
their fathers.

The worst national effects of the Terror did not disappear with the
disappearance of the guillotine. Before the fall of Robespierre, the
guillotine had come to be a financial expedient. 'We are coining money
on the Place de la Revolution,' said the estimable Barere to his
colleagues, and he counted that a poor week's work which yielded less
'than three millions of francs' from the confiscation of the property of
the victims. When under the Directory _fusillades_ took the place of the
too conspicuous guillotine, the confiscation still went on. The
Directory did no more for education than the Terror had done. The five
directors had other matters on their minds.

Barras, of whom a not unfriendly historian gently observes that, 'while
he lacked no other vice ancient or modern, he was neither very vain nor
very cruel;' Mr. Carlyle's 'hungry Parisian pleasure-hunter,' Rewbell,
of whom his special friend and colleague, Lareveillere-Lepaux, amiably
records in his Memoirs that 'his legs were too small for his body,' and
that he had 'a habit of attributing to himself speeches uttered and
deeds done by other people;' Letourneur, a corpulent rustic, whose
excellent wif