A generation corresponding to this ideal would yet need one or two reforms in the law of the land before the French peasant could reach his perfect development. First of all, let us admit that the nation has outgrown the Code Napoléon, which is a system of excessive centralization. As usual, the people are in advance of the law of the land; here as elsewhere, a fossilized system cramps and hinders the expansion of life. Even at some sacrifice of order, France would be more fortunate if she were decentralized, with more importance accorded to the country towns and rural districts. Have we not seen how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this same vice of over-centralization was fatal to the country-sides of France, even as, in the closing years of the Roman Empire, it was fatal to the country-sides of Gaul? In this lovely land of France, over-centralization is a sort of endemic disease which we may combat, but scarcely, perhaps, eradicate. Let us do our best. It were well should the law, even if it continue the principle of equal inheritance, at least permit some laxity in practice (as an insertion of the thin edge of the wedge), allowing the estate, for instance, to remain intact in the hands of the son who farms it, though a proportion of the revenue be divided yearly among his brothers and sisters. Let us take from the Old Order what was best in it. Nothing was more frequent under the _ancien régime_ than for a family to enjoy in common their paternal acres. To take a case in point:--when the great-grandfather of Ernest Renan died in 1732, his sons continued to dwell together in their old grey farm by the estuary of Ledano, without separating their shares of the estate. Gilles farmed the land; Alain, François, and Olivier manned the joint fishing-smack and salted their pilchards in common. This system of joint possession was usual in France, and suits the sociable French character. Even to-day, in some such way, the extremest results of the sub-division of property might be avoided. Thirdly, we would have every schoolmaster in France teach his children, instead of the names of the Merovingian kings, such elementary notions of physics and chemistry as explain or at least suggest the life of natural things: why the sea is salt; how the dew condenses; how the seed germinates in the earth; why such and such a soil best serves to produce such and such a crop, etc. When we see with what extraordinary swiftness the rural population of France has adopted the theories of Pasteur and their consequences, we feel that in this direction, at any rate, the rustic is not stupid. Let the peasants learn the meaning of the world in which they live; they will find it more interesting. A child who has learned to observe and reflect has the beginnings of a liberal education, and one that will not necessarily draw him from the land.