Associations of course will exist which the people will tolerate, but their right of existence is always revocable and they are always liable to be dissolved and destroyed. Otherwise the national sovereignty would be held to abdicate and it can never abdicate. --Ah! but there is one association, at least, which to some extent is sacred, and which the sovereignty of the people is bound to respect. I mean the family. The father is the head of the family, he educates his children and brings them up as he thinks best, till they come to man's estate.-- Nay, that will not pass! For here again we have a limitation of the sovereignty of the nation. The child does not belong to his father. If this were so, at the threshold of each home the sovereignty of the people would be arrested, which means that it would cease to exist anywhere. The child, like the man, belongs to the people. He belongs to it, in the sense that he must not be a member of an association which might dare to think differently from the people, or perhaps even harbour ideas in contradiction to the thought of the people. It would indeed be dangerous to leave our future citizens for twenty years outside the national thought, which is the same thing as being outside the community. Imagine five or six bees brought up apart, outside the laws, regulations, and constitution of the hive; imagine further that of these groups of bees there were several hundreds in the hive. The result would be the destruction of the hive. It is _above all things_ in the family that the sovereignty of the people ought to prevail. It ought above all things to refuse to recognise the association of the family, and to wage war against it wherever it finds it. It should leave to parents the right of embracing their children, but nothing more. The right to educate them in ideas perhaps contrary to those of their parents belongs to the people, which, here as well as elsewhere, perhaps even more than elsewhere for the interests at stake are more important, must be absolutely sovereign. This, then, is what the schoolmaster, with a relentless logic which appears to me to be irresistible, deduces from the principle of the national sovereignty. From the principle of equality he deduces another point. "All men are equal by nature and before the law." That is to say, if there were justice, all men ought to have been equal by nature, and further, if there is to be justice, all men ought to be equal before the law. Very obviously, however, all men are not equal before the law, and they are not equal by nature. Very well then, we must make them so.