THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. 203 



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 ob- 

 tained a modest place in the course. It is now time to demand politi- 

 cal 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 occu- 

 pies 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 suc- 

 cessfully organized in Paris, to fill the want of superior political in- 

 struction 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 com- 

 municating the results of their labors to the public, for France over- 

 throws 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 difiicult the questions 

 are. Lacking this, we have to be contented with plans of social or- 

 ganization improvised by journalists. In Belgium, the state has insti- 

 tuted 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 suflScient contingent of assiduous pupils, and 

 of diffusing the serious knowledge of political science through the 

 country. The classes called superior must become w^orthy 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 in- 

 tellectual, 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 aesthetic. The true means of 

 resolving the antinomies of univei'sal 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 cultiva- 

 tion, those which are fruitful are sifted from those which are sterile. 

 Two men, of nearly like intelligence, are working in a field ; instruct 



Belgian, sixty-seven per cent cited foreign notabilities of all kinds and from various 

 places, and twenty per cent could name only Leopold I or Leopold IL Such were the 

 insignificant effects of the Belgian law of 1S42 on primary instruction. 



