Public instruction, however, had been one of the first blessings which were promised under the new order of things; and accordingly plan after plan was pompously announced, as short-lived constitutions and short-sighted legislators succeeded one another. ♦TALLEYRAND’S SCHEME.♦ The Constituent Assembly promised an establishment of primary schools in the chief place of every canton; secondary ones in the capital of every district; department schools in the capitals of these larger divisions; and, finally, an Institute in the metropolis: the whole under a Commission of Public Instruction. Public tuition was not to begin before the age of six; till which time, it was said, mothers might be trusted to put in practice the immortal lessons of the author of Emilius: and girls were left wholly to their parents. ♦RELIGION OMITTED.♦ Religion made no part of the scheme[6]; and instead of teaching children faith, hope, and charity, their duties toward God and man, the Declaration of Rights was to be cast into a catechism for their use. This plan, which was the work of Talleyrand, was thrown aside when the Constituent Assembly, having completed, as they supposed, the work of demolition, made way for the Legislative Assembly, which was to erect a new edifice from the ruins. ♦CONDORCET’S SCHEME.♦ A second project was then presented by Condorcet. ♦RELIGION PROSCRIBED.♦ Revealed religion was, of course, proscribed from his scheme; and the miserable sophist said that this proscription ought to be extended to what is called natural religion also, because the theistic philosophers were no better agreed than the theologians in their notions of God, and of his moral relations to mankind. All prejudices, he said, ought now to disappear; and therefore it must now be affirmed that the study of the ancient languages would be more injurious than useful. The physical sciences were the basis of his plan; and he advised that scientific lessons should be given in public weekly lectures, and that the miracles of Elijah and St. Januarius should be exhibited, in order to cure the people of superstition. A time, he said, undoubtedly would come, when all establishments for instruction would be useless: however, as they were necessary at present, girls as well as boys were to be received in the public schools. ♦SCHEME OF THE NATIONAL CONVENTION.♦ The orators of the National Convention went farther: they maintained, that domestic education was incompatible with liberty; that the holy doctrine of equality would have been proclaimed in vain if there were any difference of education between the rich and the poor; that, of all inequalities, the inequality of knowledge was the most fatal; and that every thing which elevated one man above another in the scale of intellect was studiously to be destroyed. All children, therefore, of both sexes, ... the boys from the age of five till that of twelve, the girls from five to eleven, ... ought to be educated in common at