Although the first Bill on rural education was passed as early as 1833, nothing was done, in fact, to instruct the mass of village children in France until the advent of the Second Empire, and very little indeed before 1871, when the matter was seriously taken in hand. In my _Life of Renan_, I have spoken of the general impulse towards a moral and intellectual reform which followed in France so closely on the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war. The Prussian schoolmaster, even more than the Prussian generals, was supposed to have directed the victorious armies of the enemy; and, in education, no less than in arms, the conquered country began to prepare her _revanche_, by raising for this purpose a generation of avengers. The villages in 1871 were, in fact, almost as squalid, as narrow, as ignorant as before the revolution. The schoolmasters went to their posts in the spirit of missionaries prepared to civilize a tribe of savages, ignoring the ideal of the people among whom they dwelt, looking down on them with lofty benevolence, intending to concede nothing, but to convert, to quicken, and to change the heart. The first generation educated in the Primary Schools was treated even as a brand snatched from the burning. The children had learned from their masters to despise the animal ignorance, the brutish tastes, the sordid avarice that too often disfigured the habits of the village. And what they had learned to admire was something of which the village gave no conception. For meanwhile in the towns the Socialist siren sang, “Come here, come here, and I will give you prosperity and peace.” And to the towns went the village youth. Wages were higher there; the standard of comfort suited better with a newly acquired ideal of refinement; above all, the smoky air was full of ideas. Ideas are a passion with the French, but with no class so absolutely as with the humbler ranks of Socialism. There reigned in those regions an instant hope in the approaching advent of a better world--a millennium, in fact, as living, as real as that which animated the first era of the Christian Church. The Socialist working man was somewhat in the position of the Christian convert of one of those great towns of ancient Asia Minor or Italy--a man with the secret of a New Hope--while the villages, Pagan now as then, slumbered in their contented ignorance. To go back would have been to apostatize, to renounce, not only the life-in-life [Illustration: LUYNES]