When I speak of this education as specially destined for the people, I am not merely using words to denote its comprehensiveness and philosophic character. It is, in my opinion, the only education, with the exception of certain special branches, for which public organization is needed. It should be looked on as a sacred debt which the republic owes to the working classes. But the claim does not extend to other classes, who can easily pay for any special instruction that they may require. Besides such instruction will be only a partial development of the more general teaching, or an application of it to some particular purpose. Therefore if the general training be sound, most people will be able to prosecute accessory studies by themselves. Apprenticeship to any business involves very little, except the practice of it. Even in the highest arts, no course of systematic instruction is necessary. The false views now prevalent on the subject are due to the unfortunate absence of all general education, since the decay of Catholicism. The special institutions founded in Europe during the last three centuries, and carefully remodelled in France by the Convention, are only valuable as containing certain germs of truth, which will be found indispensable when general education is finally reorganized. But important as they may be from a scientific aspect, their practical utility, which seems to have been the motive for establishing them, is exceedingly doubtful. The arts which they were intended to promote could have done perfectly well without them. I include in these remarks such institutions as the Polytechnic School, the Museum of Natural History, etc. Their value, like that of all good institutions of modern times, is purely provisional. Viewed in this light, it may be worth our while to reorganize them. Positivist principles, discarding all attempts to make them permanent, will be all the better able to adapt them to their important temporary purpose. Indeed there are some new institutions which it might be advisable to form; such, for instance, as a School of Comparative Philology, the object of which would be to range all human languages according to their true affinities. This would compensate the suppression of Greek and Latin professorships, which is certainly an indispensable measure. But the whole of this provisional framework would no doubt disappear before the end of the nineteenth century, when a system of general education will have been thoroughly organized. The present necessity for a provisional system should lead to no misconception of its character and purpose. Working men are the only class who have a real claim upon the State for instruction; and this, if wisely organized, dispenses with the necessity of special institutions. The adoption of these views would at once facilitate and ennoble popular education. Nations, provinces, and towns will vie with one another in inviting