uit Condorcet and his 'ideologists.' It was not in the
mere revival of this principle that the true liberalism of M. Guizot
manifested itself. In the second article of his law this great statesman
provided, in express terms, that 'the wishes of families should always
be consulted and complied with in everything affecting the religious
instruction of their children.' This was indeed a step far forward in
the path of true liberalism. It was a distinct recognition of the rights
of the family as against the encroachments of the State. It was the
'liberalism' not of the 'ideologists' of 1790, nor of the Third Republic
according to M. Challemel-Lacour, but of the legislators who gave Lower
Canada her equitable system of common and of dissident schools. It was
the liberalism of those courageous men who, like Montgaillard, Bishop of
St.-Pons, had dared, under Louis XIV., and after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, to protest in 1688 against imposing the Catholic
communion by force upon the Huguenot ancestors of M. Guizot.

As Minister of Public Instruction under Louis Philippe in 1833, this
lover of true liberty simply got enacted into law the principles which
had led him as a brilliant and rising young man of letters in 1812 to
refuse to adulate the Emperor, and which he had plainly and fearlessly
set forth as the necessary conditions of the constitutional government
of France in his famous interview with Louis XVIII. three years
afterwards.

Under M. Guizot's law of 1833, the primary schools of France were much
more than doubled in number during the reign of Louis Philippe.

In the spirit of that law M. Guizot administered the affairs of France
during his long tenure of official authority, and to him, more than to
any other man, must be attributed the progress which France made under
Louis Philippe in the direction of liberty, as Englishmen and Americans
understand that much-abused word. That progress might never have been
interrupted had the counsels of M. Guizot prevailed over those of M.
Thiers with the aged monarch who trusted the one but yielded to the
other, in February 1848.

Now that a parliamentary oligarchy has deliberately undertaken, in the
name of the 'moral unity of France,' to undo all that was done between
1833 and 1848 for educational liberty in France and to protect the moral
independence of Frenchmen, it is in the highest degree interesting to
find the principles of M. Guizot energetically maintaine