The Sun.
London, England, 1856-04-12 00:00:00

We are invited to change the present system of edu-
cation, and have a right to ask from our would-be guide
that he should show us something better. The theorist
may look down upon an .educational system such as ours
has grown into, but the man who knows his country
men is aware that it is doing all that any Government
system can effeet, that we Cave already reached the full
amount of interference that public opinion will bear, and
that to ' o•o beyond this critical point is only to provoke a
recoil which may delay indefinitely further progress in
the path of national instruction. Such legislators as Lord
John Russell in their attempts to manage mankind are
apt to overlook altogether the effects of the principle of
association. In their anxiety to work out a particular
formula they overlook feelings which they ought to re-
spect an prejudices which they are bound to conciliate.
To them it is no matter whether the education of the
people be accompanied with those notions of restraint
aed corn pelsion, of State interference and dictation, so
odious to an Englishman, even when necessary, or whe-
ther he shell be led imperceptibly to regard it as the
work of his own hands, as the offspring of his own mind,
as his pride, his amusement, his occupation. At first
people grumbled much at that State inspection, which a
moment's consideration must have shown them to be
absolutely necessary to secure the proper application of
State funds. Thee grumble still, but nevertheless the
work advances. Nei one new disputes the necessity of
-education ; very few seek to clog it with unreasonable
trammels. To promote it is recopi ed by most peo-
ple as a duty, by the feet as a fasbicn ; for, short as
our teaching comes of our wishes, it is nevertheless
greater, we believe, than could be secures by any other
means than those now employed ; and it is by its pro-
bable state under a change of system, rather than by any
ideal standard, that our progress ought to be measured.
If we adopt a compulsory rate, we may be perfectly sure
that its first effect will be to destroy ail schools sup-
ported by private funds, though we are by no means so
sure that it would provide anything to replace them.
We caa imagine no niachinery so calculated to disgust
our people with education as that which first empowers
ratepayers to tax themselves, and, upon their refusal to
do so, authorises a body with which they have little
sympathy and no connexion—the Court of Quarter
Sessions—to impose a tax instead, unless, indeed, it be
the plan of Sir John Pakington, which upon the refusal
of the ratepayers to tax themselves, requires them to
appoint a school committee to tax them, as if they would
he willing to do that by an agent which they refuse to
do as pricipals ; as if they would not take care to elect
a body whose views on taxation exactly coincided with
their own • as if powers of rating and election were not
mere insults when they are only meant as a means of
depriving the ratspayerseand eleatora.ofethat control over
their own concerns which those names imply.
We have left out one consideration—the religious part
of the question—though this presents difficulties of no
ordinary magnitude. Whether the people of England
can ever be brought to consent to a general education-
rate we do not know, but certain it is that they will
never be brought to such consent till they are prepared
to embrace 'a general system of secular education,—a
conclusion from which they at this moment appear very
far removed. It is to us perfectly inconceivable—we
will not say how Lord John Russell, but how any man
who witnesses the bitter conflict abdut every farthing
that is paid out of the resources of the State for reli-
gious purposes, can suppose that he is forwarding the
interests of education by involving-it in the-same class
of difficulties which beset the question of Church rates,
of Ministers' Money, rr of the Regium Donum. We are
so heairily rated already that the addition of any new
rate must be. of itself unpopular. How much more un-
popular will it be when it implies the violation of the vo-
luntary principle, and appropriates money taken under
an actmf Parliament to rudimentary instruction in re-
- Strange, when we can now do almost all we
deetirco-withotit Offence; we should 'find statesmen rash
enough to attempt it in the most offensive manner, and
for the Sake of a slight and problematical improvement
to risk the whole of the Vsntage ground WQ have gained.
The result of last night's division will be a salutary,
leson to Ouse who imagine that the, people of this coun-
try are prepared to surrender their right of self-govern-
rnetitein educational matters into the hands of a set of
ichoolinasters and doctrinaires.

(Prom, the Times of this clay.)
The condition of Journalism and the Legislature in
Fraece enhances the iiiterest of the two great orations
recently delivered in the " Academie." The nature and
the genius of the place, the character and previous ca•
reer of those who are admitted to a seat within its walls,
attach to the speeches of the members and their sponsors
an importance which is augmented by the silence of the
Tiiliune and the docility of the press. Forbidden, not
only by considerations of policy, but by the nature of
their own peculiar topics, to touch professedly upon the
topics of current politics, the Academicians are alnio:-.1
unconsciously led into allusions which are not least
significant when they are at least premeditated. And
no occasion could be rendered so suggestive either of
contemporaneous allusion or retrospective analogy at the
election of a senator of Louis Peilippe to replace, in the
reign of Louis Napoleon, the distinguished anthor of
the " History of the Fronde."
It was natural that the Duc de Broglie should identify
his views with these of his predecessor, and should re-
cognise in that tangled medley of purposeless conflict and
resultless faction of which he was the historian all the
laws of the historic epic—a beginning, a middle, and an
end. It is consonant with the temper and the character
of the literary statesman. Moderato in his views, doc-
trinaire in his politics, and not less patriotic than phi-
lanthropic in his affections, the Duc de Broglie would be
equally reluctant to impute to any generation of his
countrymen an unaccountable passion for an unmeaning
strife, or to condemn as wholly reckless a struggle which
at first probably was, and which he must ever regard to
have been, an honest fight for ratienal liberty. And,
doubtless, this patriotic criticism must have received un-
conscious but frequent confirmation from the parallel of
motives and passions which "the Fronde" presents to
some other passages in French history. Indeed, to a
philosophic mind it would be difficult to probe the annals
of the former movement, to anatomise the conduct of
Cond6, Mazarin, and De Retz, to trace the progress of
theii varied success, without falling almost involuntarily
into an examination of the causes, the motives, and the
conduct of that more notable revolution wherein figured
Roland, Miraheau, Robespierre, St. Just, and one
greater than all these; and the judgment which bad
once been pronounced upon the moral phenomena of the
former might in spirit, if not literally, be trasferred into
a review of the second,—a prospect which would certainly
deter so hopeful and patriotic a critic as M. de Broglie
from pronouncing unfavourably on the first great organ-
ised popular uprising in the annals of modern France.
The truth is—and it is a truth which must have been
present to the candid minds not only of M. Nisard
and the Due de Broglie, but also of many
among their audience--the national characteristics
which stirred the tempest of the Fronde roused
also the greater tempest of the revolutions of
1789 and 1848, and the same characteristics intervened
at either period to divert the direction of the political
hurl beano in a cycle which their nuthorsfailed to foresee.
There may have been great intermediate changes be-
tween the two periods. The masses may have become
more numerous, More combined, more educated, but the
moral impulse and moral peculiarities of the one move-
ment were the same as those of the others. That hitter,
sneering, and remorseless logic, which ultimately be-
trayed the Constitutionalists of 1790 to a fate which no
logic could foresee, had betrayed their predecessors in
the Parliament of Paris into an alliance which no con-
sistency could justify aed no success consolidate. When
M. de Broglie recognises with M. de St. Aulaire that
golden age of the Fronde in which "on voyait pour la
premiere fois lee principes de la monarcbie Francaise,
lee maximes de notre droit public invoqu6e avec sagesee
et resolution dans la Grande Chambre par les vieux
magistrate, avec emportement dans lee enquetes par lee
jeunes conseillers," &c., be exhibits the sanguine tem
peratnent which, in another age, blinded the Girondistg
to their coming ruin. When again, he dwells upon that
worse period—"Cette epoque des ambitions effr4n6es et
des prkentions sans limites que deehaine la guerre chile;
'vette epoque de rivalites acharnees d'lntrigues galantes