Moreover, the fables would require to be arranged in a more didactic order, one more in agreement with the feelings and knowledge of the young adolescent.  Can you imagine anything so foolish as to follow the mere numerical order of the book without regard to our requirements or our opportunities.  First the grasshopper, then the crow, then the frog, then the two mules, etc.  I am sick of these two mules; I remember seeing a child who was being educated for finance; they never let him alone, but were always insisting on the profession he was to follow; they made him read this fable, learn it, say it, repeat it again and again without finding in it the slightest argument against his future calling.  Not only have I never found children make any real use of the fables they learn, but I have never found anybody who took the trouble to see that they made such a use of them.  The study claims to be instruction in morals; but the real aim of mother and child is nothing but to set a whole party watching the child while he recites his fables; when he is too old to recite them and old enough to make use of them, they are altogether forgotten.  Only men, I repeat, can learn from fables, and Emile is now old enough to begin.

I do not mean to tell you everything, so I only indicate the paths which diverge from the right way, so that you may know how to avoid them.  If you follow the road I have marked out for you, I think your pupil will buy his knowledge of mankind and his knowledge of himself in the cheapest market; you will enable him to behold the tricks of fortune without envying the lot of her favourites, and to be content with himself without thinking himself better than others.  You have begun by making him an actor that he may learn to be one of the audience; you must continue your task, for from the theatre things are what they seem, from the stage they seem what they are.  For the general effect we must get a distant view, for the details we must observe more closely.  But how can a young man take part in the business of life?  What right has he to be initiated into its dark secrets?  His interests are confined within the limits of his own pleasures, he has no power over others, it is much the same as if he had no power at all.  Man is the cheapest commodity on the market, and among all our important rights of property, the rights of the individual are always considered last of all.

When I see the studies of young men at the period of their greatest activity confined to purely speculative matters, while later on they are suddenly plunged, without any sort of experience, into the world of men and affairs, it strikes me as contrary alike to reason and to nature, and I cease to be surprised that so few men know what to do.  How strange a choice to teach us so many useless things, while the art of doing is never touched upon!  They profess to fit us for society, and we are taught as if each of us were to live a life of contemplation in a solitary