The great crying evil in France is the lack of education among the poorer classes, who nevertheless, by the democratic constitution of their country, are called upon, together with the rich and the middle classes, to take their share in the government. This evil is recognized in France, and each fresh Assembly meets at Versailles with the determination of having primary schools built and of having every child taught at least to read and write. But these good intentions are terribly hampered by the all-absorbing military appropriations, which, swallowing up some 500,000,000 francs annually, do not allow the ministers and deputies, well disposed as they are, to appropriate to the education of all France a sum much exceeding that expended by the single State of Pennsylvania in the same cause. Still, the acknowledgment of the existence of the evil is in itself a great step toward remedying it, and the France of to-day is making progress in this respect. Before the last war, instead of saying with Terence, Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto, the French citizen might rather have cried, "I am a _Frenchman_, and that which is not French is foreign to me." A salutary reaction has set in since the war, and nothing is more common than to hear Frenchmen observe that their country was conquered not by Moltke or Krupp, but rather by the German _Schullehrer_. We shall not enter into the merits of the long-standing dispute in France as to the superiority of secular or of clerical education. The parable of the mote and the beam might probably be applicable to both parties, but no impartial observer can fail to recognize that the triumph of Romanism in France, consequent upon the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, has formed one of the chief obstacles to the development of public education in that country. Huss, Luther, Calvin--in a word, all the leaders of the Reformation--inculcated the sacred duty devolving upon every man of reading the Bible for himself in his own tongue. Hence we now find education far more advanced in Protestant than in Catholic countries--a fact which has not a little contributed to the decadence of the Latin races. Richelieu, who held that a hungry people was the most submissive, was also of opinion that an ignorant people obeyed the most readily. Louis XIV. and Louis XV., without saying as much, acted up to the cardinal's maxim, doing absolutely nothing for popular education. The instruction of the upper classes was at that time in the hands of religious societies or _congregations_. The Revolution, displaying its usual iconoclastic zeal, upset this system, without reflecting for a moment that it might be as well to substitute some other system for it, and that it takes time to organize a body of teachers fit to undertake such a work. The Convention decreed that those parents should be punished who did not send their children to school, overlooking the fact that there were no schools to send them to.