[13] For example, the "States-General" of France met four times during the seventeenth century, with weighty problems of religion and state for consideration, yet in three of the four meetings resolutions were passed urging the clergy to establish schoolmasters in all the towns and villages, and a general system of compulsory education for all.
[14] Les vrais Constitutions des Religieuses de la Congrégation de Nostre Dame, chap. xi, sec. 6, 2d ed., Toul, 1694.
[15] See especially Felix Cadet, Port-Royal Education (Scribners, New York, 1898), for translations of many of the brief pedagogical writings of members of the Order.
[16] Father Demia, at Lyons, had organized what was probably the first training-school for masters, in 1672. La Salle's training-school dates from 1684. Francke's German Seminarium Praeceptorum, at Halle, the first in German lands, dates from 1696.
[17] The numerous pictures of schools and educational literature well into the nineteenth century show the general prevalence of the individual method of instruction. It was the method in American schools until well toward the middle of the nineteenth century. To have graded the children and introduced class instruction in 1684 was an important advance which the world has been slow in learning.
[18] Everything was according to rule, even the ferule, which must be made of two strips of leather, ten to twelve inches long, sewed together. All offenses, and the number and location of the blows for each, were specified. Later the corporal punishment was replaced by penances.
CHAPTER XV
[1] Representing not over one tenth of the population, the Protestants in France had from the first been subjected to much persecution. In the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew (1572) over one thousand had been massacred in Paris and ten thousand more in the provinces. After some warfare, a treaty was made, in 1598, under which the so-called "Edict of Nantes" guaranteed religious toleration for the Protestants. In 1685 this was revoked, and their ministers were given fifteen days to leave France. The members were, however, forbidden to leave. Many, though, got away, escaping to the Low Countries, England, and to America.
[2] The culmination of this dissatisfaction came in 1649, when Charles I was beheaded and "The Commonwealth" was established under Cromwell. During the troubled times which followed (1649-60) much damage was done to the churches of England by way of eliminating vestiges of "popery."
[3] Some of these went back to England—many after the establishment of the Protestant Commonwealth under Cromwell (1649). It has been estimated, for three of the early colonies, that the population by decades was approximately as follows: