The Liberty of Parents.

In the following extracts from an editorial in "La Vérité," a daily paper published in Paris, is a lesson for the large number of so-called radicals in America afflicted by the compulsory education craze:-

To make it allowable to render education absolutely compulsory, it is necessary in the first place that the education be useful to the recipient beyond all question, and in the second place that it be under the control of heads of families. The latter may be neither owners nor masters of their children, but, after all, they clearly have as many rights over them as the cabinet ministers and their agents.

Further, instruction in agriculture, stock-raising, carpentry, shoe-making, weaving, and I know not what else, is education quite as truly as that in the rules of grammar, penmanship, and the imperfect chronology called history in the primary schools, though mingled with fabulous fictions and follies. Instruction of the former kind has atleast this advantage over the other, - that it teaches a pupil a trade by which he may live, and which therefore he can not know too soon. Unless it allows pensions to all the children, or teaches them that practicle knowledge of labor which they would acquire at home, the State has no right to waste their precious time as a sacrifice to the academical systems of the cabinet.

There are some radicals who can not tolerate the idea that the children of farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers should learn to read on the knees of their mothers, while aiding in farm and household tasks, instead of under the ferules of official instructors. Parents are entirely willing that others should teach their children to read in their own way and should give them religious instruction, provided they themselves are left free to give to theirs the instruction and especially the education that seems to them good, either by themselves or the co-operation of such teachers as they may choose.

For my part, while regretting that others teach their children notions and ideas that I believe to be false, I yet prefer to leave them to complete liberty in this respect in order to retain my own, not wishing the law to compel me to hand over my children to-day to the education of the present University and to-morrow perhaps to I know not what coterie or religious faction which may chance to step into power in the place of our present masters.