The substitution of the State for the family is most detrimental in any sphere of life. In matters of education it is nothing short of a disaster. The "State School Teacher" is an anomaly. It is the subversion of true social order for it constitutes "an unwarranted interference of the State in a function preeminently social. Education is a social function and cannot be converted into a governmental charge without violence to it." What Treitsche said of the Judiciary Power in a country may well be applied to education. "We find the first and fundamental principle of jurisprudence to be that no one should be withdrawn from the jurisdiction of his natural judge." The natural school of the child is the family; the common school should be nothing but an extension of the home. The mission of the school is to supplement the home and not to supplant it. The child and the parent therefore are entitled to have the same atmosphere pervade both school and home. Everything that is relevant to education belongs to the family. A policy that favours intrusion of an undue influence of the State in the school and destroys home authority and parental influence is unnatural and therefore anti-social. The State is not the natural teacher of the child. This fusion of the political and social orders--which in reality means the suppression of the latter to the profit of the former--is the fatal error of the day and producive [Transcriber's note: productive?] of great evils. An Educational Department is the open door through which any Government may force its particular views on the growing generation. The monopoly of State education is nothing else but the conscription of the minds, an "intellectual militarism," which eventually leads to the absorption of the individual and the family and to greater disasters than war. Under the cover of citizenship it will legalize a country into servitude. The school ambitions of Prussia prepared the catastrophe the world has just witnessed. Always and everywhere the same cause will produce the same effects. _III.--A Political Reason_ Authority and liberty are the two poles on which revolves Society. The perfect equilibrium of these two contending forces, one centripetal, the other centrifugal, make for its safety and welfare. The encroachment of one upon the other displaces the social axis and throws a nation out of its natural orbit. Political Society then oscillates between autocracy and anarchy. The infringement of this supreme law of moral gravitation has strewn the paths of history with the ruins of kingdoms and empires. The violation of a natural law bears always with itself its own punishment. For, society is not the conventional creation of man; it is governed by laws that man does not make, but, which his reason and experience discover and to which he must submit.