Chapter 1: About the Education Laws

Education laws are the first that we receive. And inasmuch as they prepare us to be citizens, each individual family ought to be governed on the model of the great family which comprises them all.

If the people in general have a principle, the parts which compose the people, that is, the families, will also have the principle. Education laws, therefore, will be different in each species of government. In monarchies they will have honor as their object; in republics, virtue; in despotism, fear.

Chapter 2: About Education in Monarchies

It is not in the public institutions where folk instruct the youths that, in a monarchy, one receives the main education. It is when one enters the world that education, in a manner of speaking, begins. There is the school of what they call honor, that universal master which must guide us everywhere.

That is where one sees and always hears three things said: that it is necessary to place in virtues a certain nobility, in morals a certain frankness, and in manners a certain politeness.

The virtues that are shown to us there are always less what one owes to others than that which one owes to himself. They are not so much what draw us towards our fellow citizens as that which distinguishes us from them.

There one does not judge men's deeds as good, but as beautiful; not as just, but as great; not as reasonable, but as extraordinary.

From the moment honor can discover something of nobility in a monarchy, it is either the judge that legitimates or the sophist that justifies it.

Honor permits gallantry whenever it is connected with sentiments of the heart or the idea of conquest; and that is the true reason why morals are never so pure in a monarchy as in republican governments.

Honor allows for ruse whenever it is connected with the idea of greatness of mind or the greatness of public business, such as in politics, in which finesse gives no offense.

Honor prohibits adulation only when adulation is separated from the idea of a great fortune and is only connected with the sense of its own baseness.

With respect to morals I have said that monarchical education must provide a certain frankness. Therefore one desires truth in conversations there.