Besides the sure tokens which are given by the spirit of their particular arrangements, there are some characteristic lineaments in the general policy of your tumultuous despotism, which, in my opinion, indicate, beyond a doubt, that no revolution whatsoever in their disposition is to be expected:  I mean their scheme of educating the rising generation, the principles which they intend to instil and the sympathies which they wish to form in the mind at the season in which it is the most susceptible.  Instead of forming their young minds to that docility, to that modesty, which are the grace and charm of youth, to an admiration of famous examples, and to an averseness to anything which approaches to pride, petulance, and self-conceit, (distempers to which that time of life is of itself sufficiently liable,) they artificially foment these evil dispositions, and even form them into springs of action.  Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books recommended by public authority.  So recommended, they soon form the character of the age.  Uncertain indeed is the efficacy, limited indeed is the extent, of a virtuous institution.  But if education takes in vice as any part of its system, there is no doubt but that it will operate with abundant energy, and to an extent indefinite.  The magistrate, who in favor of freedom thinks himself obliged to suffer all sorts of publications, is under a stricter duty than any other well to consider what sort of writers he shall authorize, and shall recommend by the strongest of all sanctions, that is, by public honors and rewards.  He ought to be cautious how he recommends authors of mixed or ambiguous morality.  He ought to be fearful of putting into the hands of youth writers indulgent to the peculiarities of their own complexion, lest they should teach the humors of the professor, rather than the principles of the science.  He ought, above all, to be cautious in recommending any writer who has carried marks of a deranged understanding:  for where there is no sound reason, there can be no real virtue; and madness is ever vicious and malignant.

The Assembly proceeds on maxims the very reverse of these.  The Assembly recommends to its youth a study of the bold experimenters in morality.  Everybody knows that there is a great dispute amongst their leaders, which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau.  In truth, they all resemble him.  His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their manners.  Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day or the debauches of the night.  Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his life he is their canon of Polycletus; he is their standard figure of perfection.  To this man and this writer, as a pattern to authors and to Frenchmen, the foundries of Paris are now running for statues, with the kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches.  If an author had written like a great genius on geometry, though his practical and speculative morals were vicious in the extreme, it might appear that in voting the statue they honored only the geometrician.  But Rousseau is a moralist or he is nothing.  It is impossible, therefore, putting the circumstances together, to mistake their design in choosing the author with whom they have begun to recommend a course of studies.