第52章

soldier, dredger, cabin-boy, fagot-maker, and exciseman.There he will wait, until death, thinning the ranks, enables him to advance a step.Under such circumstances a man, a graduate of the polytechnic school and capable of becoming a Vauban, may die a laborer on a second class road, or a corporal in a regiment Oh! how much more prudent Catholicism has shown itself, and how far it has surpassed you all, St.Simonians, republicans, university men, economists, in the knowledge of man and society! The priest knows that our life is but a voyage, and that our perfection cannot be realized here below; and he contents himself with outlining on earth an education which must be completed in heaven.The man whom religion has moulded, content to know, do, and obtain what suffices for his earthly destiny, never can become a source of embarrassment to the government: rather would he be a martyr.

O beloved religion! is it necessary that a bourgeoisie which stands in such need of you should disown you?...

Into what terrible struggles of pride and misery does this mania for universal instruction plunge us! Of what use is professional education, of what good are agricultural and commercial schools, if your students have neither employment nor capital? And what need to cram one's self till the age of twenty with all sorts of knowledge, then to fasten the threads of a mule-jenny or pick coal at the bottom of a pit? What! you have by your own confession only three thousand positions annually to bestow upon fifty thousand possible capacities, and yet you talk of establishing schools!

Cling rather to your system of exclusion and privilege, a system as old as the world, the support of dynasties and patriciates, a veritable machine for gelding men in order to secure the pleasures of a caste of Sultans.

Set a high price upon your teaching, multiply obstacles, drive away, by lengthy tests, the son of the proletaire whom hunger does not permit to wait, and protect with all your power the ecclesiastical schools, where the students are taught to labor for the other life, to cultivate resignation, to fast, to respect those in high places, to love the king, and to pray to God.For every useless study sooner or later becomes an abandoned study:

knowledge is poison to slaves.

Surely M.Chevalier has too much sagacity not to have seen the consequences of his idea.But he has spoken from the bottom of his heart, and we can only applaud his good intentions: men must first be men; after that, he may live who can.

Thus we advance at random, guided by Providence, who never warns us except with a blow: this is the beginning and end of political economy.

Contrary to M.Chevalier, professor of political economy at the College of France, M.Dunoyer, an economist of the Institute, does not wish instruction to be organized.The organization of instruction is a species of organization of labor; therefore, no organization.Instruction, observes M.Dunoyer, is a profession, not a function of the State; like all professions, it ought to be and remain free.It is communism, it is socialism, it is the revolutionary tendency, whose principal agents have been Robespierre, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and M.Guizot, which have thrown into our midst these fatal ideas of the centralization and absorption of all activity in the State.

The press is very free, and the pen of the journalist is an object of merchandise;

religion, too, is very free, and every wearer of a gown, be it short or long, who knows how to excite public curiosity, can draw an audience about him.M.Lacordaire has his devotees, M.Leroux his apostles, M.Buchez his convent.Why, then, should not instruction also be free? If the right of the instructed, like that of the buyer, is unquestionable, and that of the instructor, who is only a variety of the seller, is its correlative, it is impossible to infringe upon the liberty of instruction without doing violence to the most precious of liberties, that of the conscience.And then, adds M.Dunoyer, if the State owes instruction to everybody, it will soon be maintained that it owes labor; then lodging; then shelter....Where does that lead to?

The argument of M.Dunoyer is irrefutable: to organize instruction is to give to every citizen a pledge of liberal employment and comfortable wages; the two are as intimately connected as the circulation of the arteries and the veins.But M.Dunoyer's theory implies also that progress belongs only to a certain select portion of humanity, and that barbarism is the eternal lot of nine-tenths of the human race.It is this which constitutes, according to M.Dunoyer, the very essence of society, which manifests itself in three stages, religion, hierarchy, and beggary.So that in this system, which is that of Destutt de Tracy, Montesquieu, and Plato, the antinomy of division, like that of value, is without solution.

It is a source of inexpressible pleasure to me, I confess, to see M.

Chevalier, a defender of the centralization of instruction, opposed by M.Dunoyer, a defender of liberty; M.Dunoyer in his turn antagonized by M.Guizot; M.Guizot, the representative of the centralizers, contradicting the Charter, which posits liberty as a principle; the Charter trampled under foot by the University men, who lay sole claim to the privilege of teaching, regardless of the express command of the Gospel to the priests:

Go and teach.And above all this tumult of economists, legislators, ministers, academicians, professors, and priests, economic Providence giving the lie to the Gospel, and shouting: Pedagogues! what use am I to make of your instruction?

Who will relieve us of this anxiety? M.Rossi leans toward eclecticism: