Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/215

Rh Not only should primary political instruction be extended and fortified, but a secondary and superior political instruction should be created, for they do not exist in France. We some years ago made a demand for the introduction of political economy. It has since obtained a modest place in the course. It is now time to demand political and juridical instruction. Superior political instruction is in the most incomplete condition in France. In Germany, chairs of Public Law and Social Science are established in all the universities. The same is the case in Holland, Belgium, and Italy. M. Bluntschli occupies a chair of this kind at Heidelberg; can it be otherwise than that a professor of his talents should have rendered great services in so important a course? A free school of political science has been successfully organized in Paris, to fill the want of superior political instruction which is so apparent. It has been well said that France, more than any other country, ought to have professors charged with the duty of studying the conditions of the best government, and communicating the results of their labors to the public, for France overthrows its government and looks for a better one every twenty years. The scientific study of political questions would doubtless moderate this ardor for change, by showing to all how difficult the questions are. Lacking this, we have to be contented with plans of social organization improvised by journalists. In Belgium, the state has instituted a diploma for political sciences, which is a title of preference to administrative functions. As M. de Laveleye remarks, this is the only means of securing a sufficient contingent of assiduous pupils, and of diffusing the serious knowledge of political science through the country. The classes called superior must become worthy of their name. The movement will have to come from them and be spread through the totality. Moved and directed by them, popular suffrage will be, as has been said, useful by means of its sheer inertia, as the fly-wheel of a machine regulates and augments the force of the motor.

In the struggle of the nations for existence, the future will assure the triumph to the people who best comprehend that the highest intellectual, moral, and social culture is also the most necessary to its grandeur and power. The more democratic a nation is, the more it is inclined to be utilitarian, and yet it must not be wholly utilitarian. It wants an abundance of the moral and æsthetic. The true means of resolving the antinomies of universal suffrage is the widest possible distribution of the highest possible instruction. In this, society has only to follow the example of Nature, which causes unequal beings to rise from the equality of the mean. Of seeds under the same cultivation, those which are fruitful are sifted from those which are sterile. Two men, of nearly like intelligence, are working in a field; instruct