The schoolmaster has always been a mark for raillery, and sometimes justly so; to-day he is slightly regarded by everyone with any pretensions to high acquirements. Renan and Taine, and partisans generally of an intellectual aristocracy, can scarcely suppress a smile at the mention of this representative of democracy, of science for small children. University professors show small tolerance for the pedantry of their humble assistant, who is sometimes ignorant of Greek. Men of culture, with any tincture of poetry or of art, regard the man as something very prosaic and utilitarian whose main ambition is to instruct some thousands of peasants in the alphabet, grammar, and the names of the principal cities of Europe, and of the geographical localities from which we obtain pepper and coffee. And yet this despised schoolmaster, whose importance is daily increasing, is the sole middle-man between the belated masses and the intellectual élite, who are moving ever more and more rapidly forward. He has the advantage of being necessary and the disadvantage of knowing it; buried in his remote village, his accomplishments impress him almost as much as they do the children and the peasantry about him; the optical illusion is a natural one. But if an exaggerated estimate of his own importance sometimes gives rise in him to an offensive pedantry, it supplies him with the sort of devotion that enables a humble functionary to rise to the height of the duties to which he has been called. And who, after all, but society, is responsible for the fashioning and instruction of the schoolmaster? And cannot society raise the level of his intelligence in proportion as it increases the magnitude of his task? A little knowledge makes a pedant, much knowledge makes a scholar. There will always be schoolmasters who will be as well educated as one could wish, provided only that their salaries are raised side by side with the list of required studies. It is strange that a society should not do its best to form those whose function it is in turn to form it. The great question of popular education becomes in certain aspects a question of shillings and pence. The practical instruction of schoolmasters has already been carried to a certain degree of perfection; he has been initiated into an apprenticeship, and introduced, as it were, into the kitchen of certain sciences; he has been supplied with notions on agriculture and chemistry which often enable him to give excellent advice to the peasantry. It would be very easy a little to perfect his theoretical knowledge, to give him a broader knowledge of the sciences which he considers too exclusively on their practical side, to give him some conception of things as a whole, to raise him above an exclusive adoration of the isolated facts of historical or grammatical minutiæ. A little philosophy would make a better historian and a less tedious geographer. He might be introduced to the great cosmological hypotheses, to some sufficient