Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/278

to-day is to hark back perpetually to the Dreyfus Affair. Everything seems to date from it, everything to touch it, everything to be explained by it. The misfortunes of no single man in all history have ever left such abiding and momentous consequences as those of the Alsatian Jewish officer, whose return to his native land all Europe stood still to watch with thrilled pulses. And so it was felt, as infamy after infamy practised against him was discovered, that the people should be educated to think for themselves, to know and understand what is being done in their name. It was felt, too, that they should have their share of the intellectual ideas, the moral and mental beauty that brightens life and gives it zest, hitherto appropriated by the rich and leisured classes. What M. Deherme calls the co-operation in idea, the basis of the people's colleges of Paris, is really the popularisation of culture. Anything is good that will help to keep the workmen out of the wineshops, where they are poisoned with inferior and inflammable alcohol, and guard them from the political garbage of their inferior and inflammable newspapers. If you cannot give the workman space, privacy, wealth, and luxurious home-life, at least make him free in his heritage of the thoughts that move the ages, put him in contact with the current of ideas in the ambient air. And so M. Deherme's