So is the motto of the French Republic written the length and breadth of
that valley, though it may never actually be seen upon a lintel or door-
post: the "liberty" of access to the knowledges which are to assist in
making men as free as they can be; an elevating "equality" such as a State
can give to men of unequal endowments, capacities, and ambitions; and a
"fraternity" which is unconscious of else than real differences.
I gave intimation in an earlier chapter of the cosmopolitan quality of the
human material gathered into those houses of prophecy. There is separation
of Caucasian from African in the south, and there is more or less
unwilling association of Caucasian and Oriental in places of the far west
on the Pacific slope, but except for these and for individual instances
where, for example, the social extremes are brought together, these
minglings are but microcosms of the State itself. The schools are not in
that valley, in any sense, places provided by wealth for poverty, by one
class for another--charity schools; they are the natural meeting-houses of
democracy, with as little atmosphere of pauper or class schools as the
highways, on which even the President must obey the custom which controls
the humblest.
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