Leipzig Commercial High School.

has taken serious steps to provide commercial education of the highest order, and the Germans are still by no means unanimous as to its value. The scheme establishing the High School of Commerce in Leipzig was approved by the Saxon Government in 1898. It is intended that this institution should hold precisely the same relation to commerce as the great technical high schools hold to Industry. Nobody is admitted to his course of studies who has not received a sound

general education. Candidates are, according to the official regulations, admissible only if they satisfy one or other of the following conditions :-

(a) They possess the certificate of Maturity of a Gymnasium, Real-Gymnasium, or Ober-Realschule. (b) They are persons engaged in trade who hold the six years' certificate of one of the secondary schools.

(c) They are students from German Training Colleges, or Elementary School teachers who have passed the second general examination for such teachers.

(d) They are foreigners over twenty years of age who can prove that they possess the required standard of preparatory education.

In the year 1899-1900 there were 275 students in the Leipzig Commercial High School. Of these 21 were 18 years of age, 42 were 19, 45 were 20, 35 were 22, and 23 were over 30. The school

receives a small subsidy from the Saxon Government, and the Leipzig Chamber of Commerce undertakes all financial responsibility. Educationally it is closely associated with the University, the professors of which have much to do with the organization of the courses of studies.

The school offers two diplomas-one to students who have passed through a course of studies with success, and one to these who had passed a special examination to test their competence as teachers in commercial schools. It is yet too early to attempt to measure the results attained in Germany by the highest kind of commercial education.

CHAPTER V.

THE FOUNDATIONS LAID IN FRANCE.

THE national purpose which we have seen at work in Germany is also to be traced in France throughout the course of the nineteenth century. But the political conditions affecting France during this period have been so different from those which have arisen in Prussia, that it would indeed be strange if there were any striking similarity between the systems of education in the two countries. The dawn of the nineteenth century saw the commencements of a new France, loud in its assertion of the rights of man. "Next to bread," said one of the greatest figures in the Revolution, "education is the first need of the people."

At the commencement of the Revolution, the followers of different philosophers, with their systems, their formulas and their constitutions, first attempted to guide the new democracy rising on the ruin of the old order of things. Voltaire was mainly responsible for the overthrow of the old systems. While, however, his teaching had

been chiefly negative, attacking accepted beliefs and recognized systems, Rousseau followed as the creator of beliefs and systems which were to replace those which were disappearing.

It is not intended to suggest that in any country thinkers and philosophers actually control the course of human progress. From time to time men grow discontented with the existing order of things; the institutions which they have reared fail to satisfy actual needs. Silently they cease to support them-silently, because the very forms of speech which they have acquired have been moulded and fashioned under the influence of these institutions. Action-the physical push, so to speak-which will send these institutions tottering to the ground, is impossible until the new language is created, freeing men from the bonds of silence, and enabling them to intercommunicate, to plot, and to devise. At such moments a thinker will arise who finds the new language to express the silent thought. Such a man was Voltaire.

But the inborn tendency to progress will never allow man to be satisfied with mere destruction. Anarchy may reign for a moment, but where man has destroyed he will inevitably rebuild, and the new language is not complete until it is made the medium for expressing, not merely the condemnation of the old, but also the proclamation

Voltaire and Rousseau.

of the new. Hesitating between the ills we have and those we know not of, we grope about searching for some assurance of future amelioration, until silently we perceive a ray of truth illumining possible ultimate good. It shines not for us alone, it is visible to our fellows also. We need but the new language to call to one another across the darkness and above the tumult of the vanishing past: we need but the interchange of thought to give us that union and support of fellowship without which we fear to walk upon the unknown waters. The great thinker, who is the first to speak under these circumstances, will give us the new language; he will express our thoughts for us in words, and thus may seem to posterity to influence us. But we know that when once we have communicated with our fellows, and have found the common purpose in all their hearts, the common perception of the new light in all their minds, we are urged onwards by the force of our own wills.

Voltaire gave to the French the language of destruction, Rousseau gave them the language of creation. With all his paradoxes and false reasonings, with all his baseless assumptions and weakwitted dreams, Rousseau it was who first proclaimed to France the dawn of the new light which she was silently contemplating.

He would seem to

that the old order