After all is said, however, our manuals have the advantage over the catechism in the clearness of their definitions (not all correct, it is true) and in the immediate value of the instruction. For example, M. Laloi gives information as to the placing out of money, reproduces the formulas in use in the ordinary acts of life, etc. I should take care not to blame, either this good practical sense, or this manner of instructing the child according to his capacity to understand himself and understand the world which surrounds him. In the modest articles of our little class-books, is found summed up, definitively, the secular experience of human societies, and this also has an aggregative value.
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Numerous are the works written among us by distinguished authors to introduce youthful minds into the various sciences. The Bibliothèque utile already includes several, and among them one of the best will always be the book of ADOLPHE COSTE, La Richesse et le Bonheur,[140] with which that library is about to enrich itself. M. Coste has reproduced here, in order to express them in a simple form, the doctrines expounded in his large works. But there is also contributed something new, as to what he calls property, for example. The Manuals of which I just spoke base all property on labor alone. Mme. Henry Gréville defines it "a right, based on the difficulty that any one has had in acquiring a thing." It would be proper to add—"and to save a thing," in taking account of the more exact analysis made by M. Coste. For if it is true that "consumable goods" are always due to labor in some manner, it is no less true that "productive capital," can only be acquired by putting a part of these goods outside of the current consumption, that is to say by saving something of that which one possesses. Saving is to-day the only regular source of accumulation of wealth; it is one of the indispensable factors of property. The usual definition sees only the other factor of wealth, labor, and opens thus the road to the dangerous sophism of which the workmen make a weapon, when they claim that they alone ought to possess, as they produce.
[140] Publisher of the Bibliothèque utile, F. Alcan.
Let us quote the passage. It is exact. "By his labor man takes possession of the fruits, he enters into the enjoyment of his part of the product: this is in some sort only a personal right which disappears at once with consumption. But from the time that this man saves something from consumption and establishes capital, he becomes a proprietor, he acquires a social right. Fundamentally, property is the public acknowledgment of the service rendered to the community by the increase of the productive capital" (p. 25).
I will notice further, in the work of M. Coste, the difficulty that it describes, and that greatly embarrasses economists, of reconciling the value of labor, due to individual effort, with the value of exchange, imposed by the general needs. As to the relations between Wealth and Happiness, he judges them intimate enough: happiness resides chiefly, according to him, in activity, which has for its principal forms the acquisition of wealth and the productive employment of wealth. The question would appear undoubtedly more complex, from the psychological point of view. But we could very well content ourselves with this notion, clear and sound, of an economical happiness.
One has always pleasure in reading M. Coste, because he has just ideas, because he approaches questions of political economy as a naturalist and studies the facts in their evolution. It is the best method for understanding the subject. The deductive economists have never failed to deceive us. I would wish in the public interest for numerous readers of treatises of this kind.
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Some day or other, the occasion will present itself for us to speak somewhat fully of pedagogy. Certainly, if the passion of magister was ever exaggerated, it is in our day, and, through logic and principles, it will become in time more difficult to make a little boy eat his porridge than to govern an empire. In all that has been done, I see some good, but much evil; I am afraid that little artificial prodigies will in time be produced, and that we shall be given hot-house oranges instead of fine fruit ripened in full sunshine. Books follow books, and mistakes succeed mistakes. There is everywhere an embarrassment of talents, scarcity of characters. Have the causes of it been unravelled and the remedy discovered? In order to judge the results, let us wait half a century!
M. EUGENE MAILLET, whose work—L'Education, Elements de psychologie de l'homme et de l'enfant appliquée à la pédagogie—I have formally to announce,[141] will readily excuse, I hope, this quarter of an hour's bad humor. It is not from him that I take it, and his work gives evidence of too much experience, too much study, that a high value should not be placed on it. The present volume is only the first part of it; "the second part will have for its object education itself, considered at first in its idea, then in its various forms,—physical education, education of the heart, education of the mind, education of the will and of the character, finally in the general principles of logic and morality which ought to dominate it and without which the rules of a wisely graduated methodology or of a rational discipline cannot be established."