INSTRUCTION IN THE HOME.

Whether wives should or should not be put under instruction--such is
the question before us. Of all those which we have discussed this is
the only one which has two extremes and admits of no compromise.
Knowledge and ignorance, such are the two irreconcilable terms of this
problem. Between these two abysses we seem to see Louis XVIII
reckoning up the felicities of the eighteenth century, and the
unhappiness of the nineteenth. Seated in the centre of the seesaw,
which he knew so well how to balance by his own weight, he
contemplates at one end of it the fanatic ignorance of a lay brother,
the apathy of a serf, the shining armor on the horses of a banneret;
he thinks he hears the cry, "France and Montjoie-Saint-Denis!" But he
turns round, he smiles as he sees the haughty look of a manufacturer,
who is captain in the national guard; the elegant carriage of a stock
broker; the simple costume of a peer of France turned journalist and
sending his son to the Polytechnique; then he notices the costly
stuffs, the newspapers, the steam engines; and he drinks his coffee
from a cup of Sevres, at the bottom of which still glitters the "N"
surmounted by a crown.

"Away with civilization! Away with thought!"--That is your cry. You
ought to hold in horror the education of women for the reason so well
realized in Spain, that it is easier to govern a nation of idiots than
a nation of scholars. A nation degraded is happy: if she has not the
sentiment of liberty, neither has she the storms and disturbances
which it begets; she lives as polyps live; she can be cut up into two
or three pieces and each piece is still a nation, complete and living,
and ready to be governed by the first blind man who arms himself with