ary or other reactionists say what they will, and that is, that in a moral point of view the world is vastly better to-day than it was centuries ago. The world has had its ages of faith; the world has now its age of comparative reason. If we want poisoners who could outdo the performances of M. Feuillet's young woman in La Morte, we go to the ages of faith, we seek them in papal courts amid cardinals and their relatives. If we want filial ingratitude in far more hideous forms than M. Duruy has undertaken to paint, the same society, in the same age, will furnish it. The true middle age is shown in the works it has produced, in the Decameron of Boccaccio and the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, in which lust and superstition walk hand in hand. Charles Reade has also given a powerful picture of it in his acknowledged masterpiece, The Cloister and the Hearth. Let any one compare the condition of Europe at that time with its condition to-day, and then say whether the material, moral, and intellectual interests of mankind have not gained immensely by the emancipation of thought and the weakening of authority.
But if we look at the case presented to us by M. Duruy in Ni Dieu ni Maître, we shall see how very ill he conceives the duties of a really enlightened father toward his children. His Pierre Nogaret. a physician in the very front rank of his profession, with an annual income of over a hundred thousand francs, has two children, Maurice and Adrienne, whose mother is dead. Instead of interesting himself in their education, he turns them over to hired teachers, and never asks what progress they are making or how their characters are developing. In a conversation between the brother and sister, the former is made to say: "I have grown up I don't know how; no one has ever told me what is right or what is wrong, and I can't find it out entirely by myself. Papa made me take up the study of the sciences, but he never took the trouble to see whether I learned anything, and now there are moments when I feel that I am not worth a rush." The sister has very much the same account to give of her education; and both brother and sister w r ere brought up, as the story shows, in very extravagant habits. Both were launched into the world of fashion without any effort being made to guard them against the temptations to which they were thus exposed.
Now why, we ask, should this be offered to us as an example of education upon modern principles? Why should a man, because he has embraced, let us say, evolutionary views, allow the education of his children to proceed at hap-hazard? Why should such a man leave his children unprotected against the seductions of a vitiated society? Why should he allow their home affections to be weakened and stunted by a senseless immersion in social gayeties? If a clever writer wishes to do justice to the great question which MM. Feuillet and Duruy approach in so partisan a spirit, let him draw a picture of a man who has discarded superstition because of its demonstrated falsity, who has embraced the principles and results of science because of their demonstrated truth, and whose aim it is to do in his lifetime the utmost amount of good that circumstances permit. Then let this man have in conjunction with these elevated views a certain amount of common sense. If he has children whom he sincerely loves—and such love is not an unreasonable postulate in a father—let him recognize that, if they are to dispense with the conventional aids to right conduct, they must have others in their place, and let him duly cultivate their moral and emotional nature. Let him refrain from placing them, or allowing them to be placed, in circumstances of too great temptation. Let him carefully guard against their becoming the slaves of luxury and idleness. Let him not give them as associates persons
