At this moment I am intimate with a number of distinguished men who concern themselves with all the moral maladies which are now afflicting France.  They see, as I do, that our highest education is manufacturing temporary capacities,—­temporary because they are without exercise and without future; that such education is without profit to the State because it is devoid of the vigor of belief and feeling.  Our whole system of public education needs overhauling, and the work should be presided over by some man of great knowledge, powerful will, and gifted with that legislative genius which has never been met with among moderns, except perhaps in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Possibly our superfluous numbers might be employed in giving elementary instruction so much needed by the people.  The deplorable amount of crime and misdemeanors shows a social disease directly arising from the half-education given the masses, which tends to the destruction of social ties by making the people reflect just enough to desert the religious beliefs which are favorable to social order, and not enough to lift them to the theory of obedience and duty, which is the highest reach of the new transcendental philosophy.  But as it is impossible to make a whole nation study Kant, therefore I say fixed beliefs and habits are safer for the masses than shallow studies and reasoning.

If I had my life to begin over again, perhaps I would enter a seminary and become a simple village priest, or the teacher of a country district.  But I am too far advanced in my profession now to be a mere primary instructor; I can, if I leave my present post, act in a wider range than that of a school or a country parish.  The Saint-Simonians, to whom I have been tempted to ally myself, want now to take a course in which I cannot follow them.  Nevertheless, in spite of their mistakes, they have touched on many of the sore spots which are the fruits of our present legislation, and which the State will only doctor by insufficient palliatives,—­merely delaying in France the moral and political crisis that must come.

  Adieu, dear Monsieur Grossetete; accept the assurance of my
  respectful attachment, which, notwithstanding all these
  observations, can only increase.

Gregoire Gerard.

According to his old habit as a banker, Grossetete had jotted down his reply on the back of the letter itself, heading it with the sacramental word, Answered.

It is useless, my dear Gerard, to discuss the observations made in your letter, because by a trick of chance (I use the term which is, as you say, the pet word of fools) I have a proposal to make to you which may result in withdrawing you from the situation you find so bad.  Madame Graslin, the owner of the forests of Montegnac and of a barren plateau extending from the base of a chain of mountains on which are the forests, wishes to improve this vast