impression on the brain.  Now observe, that Roman society is directly opposed to what our society ought to be.  There they lived upon war; here we ought to hate war.  There they hated labour; here we ought to live upon labour.  There the means of subsistence were founded upon slavery and plunder; here they should be drawn from free industry.  Roman society was organised in consequence of its principle.  It necessarily admired what made it prosper.  There they considered as virtue, what we look upon as vice.  Its poets and historians had to exalt what we ought to despise.  The very words, liberty, order, justice, people, honour, influence, _&c._, could not have the same signification at Rome, as they have, or ought to have, at Paris.  How can you expect that all these youths who have been at university or conventual schools, with Livy and Quintus Curtius for their catechism, will not understand liberty like the Gracchi, virtue like Cato, patriotism like Caesar?  How can you expect them not to be factious and warlike?  How can you expect them to take the slightest interest in the mechanism of our social order?  Do you think that their minds have been prepared to understand it?  Do you not see that, in order to do so, they must get rid of their present impressions, and receive others entirely opposed to them?

B. What do you conclude from that?

F. I will tell you.  The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education.  All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.

The Law.

The law perverted!  The law—­and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation—­the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary!  The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check!  The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish!  Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow-citizens.

We hold from God the gift which, as far as we are concerned, contains all others, Life—­physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot support itself.  He who has bestowed it, has entrusted us with the care of supporting it, of developing it, and of perfecting it.  To that end, He has provided us with a collection of wonderful faculties; He has plunged us into the midst of a variety of elements.  It is by the application of our faculties to these elements, that the phenomena of assimilation and of appropriation, by which life pursues the circle which has been assigned to it, are realized.

Existence, faculties, assimilation—­in other words, personality, liberty, property—­this is man.  It is of these three things that it may be said, apart from all demagogue subtlety, that they are anterior and superior to all human legislation.