Mauprat
be the same for all? I quite believe that if I had been sent to school when I was ten, I should have become a civilized being earlier; but would any one have thought of correcting my violent passions, and of teaching me how to conquer them as Edmée did? I doubt it. Every man needs to be loved before he can be worth anything; but each in a different way; one with never-failing indulgence, another with unflinching seventy. Meanwhile, until some one solves the problem of making education common to all, and yet appropriate to each, try to improve one another.
Do you ask me how? My answer will be brief: by loving one another truly. It is in this way—for the manners of a people mould their laws—that you will succeed in suppressing the most odious and impious of all laws, the lex talionis, capital punishment, which is nothing else than the consecration of the principle of fatality, seeing that it supposes the culprit incorrigible and Heaven implacable.
415
