Meanwhile, the innate vices of the primitive system have lasted and, and, among others, the worst of all, the internat6344 under the discipline of barracks or convent, while the university, through its priority and supremacy, in contact with or contiguously, has communicated this discipline at first to its subordinates, and afterward to its rivals.—In 1887,6345 in the State lycÉes and colleges, there are more than 39,000 boarding-schools (internes) while, in the ecclesiastic establishments, it is worse: out of 50,000 pupils there, over 27,000 are internes, to which must be added the 23,000 pupils of the small seminaries, properly so called, nearly all of them boarders; in a total of 163,000 pupils we find 89,000 internes.6346 Thus, to secure secondary instruction, more than one-half of the youth of France undergo the internat, ecclesiastic or secular. This is peculiar to France, and is due to the way in which Napoleon, in 1806, seized on and perverted all school enterprises.6347

Before 1789, in France, this enterprise, although largely trammeled and impeded by the State and the Church, was not violated in principle nor perverted in essence; still at the present day, in Germany, in England, in the United States, it exists and is developed in accordance with its nature. It is admitted to be a private enterprise,6348 the collective and spontaneous work of several associates voluntarily bound together, old founders, actual and future benefactors, masters and parents and even scholars,6349 each in his place and function, under a statute and according to tradition, in such a way as to continue functioning indefinitely, in order to provide, like a gas company on its own responsibility, at its own risk and expense, a provider of services for those who want it; in other terms, the school enterprise must, like any other undertaking, render acceptable what it offers thereby satisfying the needs of its clients.—Naturally, it adapts itself to these needs; its directors and those concerned do what is necessary. With hands free, and grouped around an important interest evidently for a common purpose, mutually bound and veritable associates not only legally but in feeling, devoted to a local enterprise and local residents for many years, often even for life, they strive not to offend the profound repugnance of the young and of families. They therefore make the necessary arrangements internally and with the parents.6350

That is why, outside of France, the French internat, so artificial, so forced, so exaggerated, is almost unknown. In Germany, out of one hundred pupils in the gymnases, which correspond to our lycÉes, there are scarcely ten boarders lodged and fed in the gymnase; the rest, even when their parents do not live near by, remain day-scholars, private guests in the families that harbor them, often at a very low price and which take the place of the absent family. No boarders are found in them except in a few gymnases like Pforta and by virtue of an ancient endowment. The number, however, by virtue of the same endowment, is limited; they dine, in groups of eight or ten,6351 at the same table with the professors lodged like themselves in the establishment, while they enjoy for a playground a vast domain of woods, fields and meadow.—The same in England, at Harrow, Eton and Rugby. Each professor, here, is keeper of a boarding-house; he has ten, twenty and thirty boys under his roof, eating at his table or at a table the head of which is some lady of the house. Thus, the youth goes from the family into the school, without painful or sudden contrast, and remains under a system of things which suits his age and which is a continuation, only enlarged, of domestic life.6352

The French college or lycÉe is quite the opposite. It operates against the true spirit of the school, and has done so for eighty years being an enterprise of the State, a local extension of a central enterprise, one of the hundred branches of the great State university trunk, possessing no roots of its own and with a directing or teaching staff composed of functionaries similar to others, that is to say transferable,6353 restless and preoccupied with promotion, their principal motive for doing well being the hope of a higher rank and of getting a better situation. This almost separate them in advance from the establishment in which they labor and,6354 besides that, they are led, pushed on, and restrained from above, each in his own particular sphere and in his limited duty. The principal (proviseur) is confined to his administrative position and the professor to his class, expressly forbidden to leave it. No professor is "under any pretext to receive in his house as boarders or day-scholars more than ten pupils."6355 No woman is allowed to lodge inside the lycÉe or college walls, all,—proviseur, censor, cashier, chaplain, head-masters and assistants, fitted by art or force to each other like cog-wheels, with no deep sympathy, with no moral tie, without collective interests, a cleverly designed machine which, in general, works accurately and smoothly, but with no soul because, to have a soul, it is of prime necessity to have a living body. As a machine constructed at Paris according to a unique pattern and superposed on people and things from Perpignan to Douai and from Rochelle to BesanÇon, it does not adapt itself to the requirements of the public; it subjects its public to the exigencies, rigidity and uniformity of its play and structure. Now, as it acts mechanically only, through outward pressure, the human material on which it operates must be passive, composed, not of diverse persons, but of units all alike; its pupils must be for it merely numbers and names.—Owing to this our internats, those huge stone boxes set up and isolated in each large town, those lycÉes parceled out to hold three hundred, four hundred, even eight hundred boarders, with immense dormitories, refectories and playgrounds, recitation-rooms full to overflowing, and, for eight or ten years, for one half of our children and youths, an anti-social unnatural system apart, strict confinement, no going out except to march in couples under the eyes of a sub-teacher who maintains order in the ranks, promiscuity and life in common, exact and minute regularity under equal discipline and constant constraint in order to eat, sleep, study, play, promenade and the rest,—in short, COMMUNISM.

From the University this system is propagated among its rivals. In conferring grades and passing examinations, it arranges and overburdens the school program of study; hence, it incites in others what it practices at home, the over-training of youth, and a factitious, hot-house education. On the other hand, the internat is, for those who decide on that, less troublesome than the day-school;6356 also, the more numerous the boarders in any one establishment, the less the expense; thus, in order to exist in the face of the university establishments, there must be internats and internats that are full. Ecclesiastical establishments willingly resign themselves to all this; they are even inclined that way; the Jesuits were the first ones, under the old monarchy, who introduced cloistered and crowded boarding-houses. In its essence, the Catholic church, like the French State, is a Roman institution, still more exclusive and more governmental, resolved to seize, hold on to, direct and control man entirely, and, first of all, the child, head and heart, opinions and impressions, in order to stamp in him and lastingly the definitive and salutary forms which are for him the first condition of salvation. Consequently, the ecclesiastical cage is more strict in its confinement than the secular cage; if the bars are not so strong and not so rough, the grating, finer and more yielding, is more secure, closer and better maintained; they do not allow any holes or relaxation of the meshes; the precautions against worldly and family interference, against the mistakes and caprices of individual effort, are innumerable, and form a double or even triple network. For, to school discipline is added religious discipline, no less compulsory, just as rigid and more constant—daily pious exercises, ordinary devotions and extraordinary ceremonies, spiritual guidance, influence of the confessional and the example and behavior of a staff kept together around the same work by the same faith. The closer the atmosphere, the more powerful the action; the chances are that the latter will prove decisive on the child sequestered, sheltered and brought up in a retort, and that its intellect, faith and ideas, carefully cultivated, pruned and always under direction, will exactly reproduce the model aimed at.—For this reason, in 1876, 33,000 out of 46,000 pupils belonging to the 309 ecclesiastical establishments of secondary instruction, are internes,6357 and the Catholic authorities admit that, in the 86 small seminaries, no day-scholars, no future lay persons, are necessary.

This conclusion is perhaps reasonable in relation to the 23,000 pupils of the small seminaries, and for the 10,000 pupils in the great seminaries; it is perhaps reasonable also for the future military officers formed by the State at La FlÈche, Saint-Cyr, Saumur, and on the Borda.6358 Whether future soldiers or future priests, their education fits them for the life they are to lead; what they are to become as adults, they already are as youths and children; the internat, under a convent discipline or that of the barracks, qualifies them beforehand for their profession. Since they must possess the spirit of it they must contract its habits. Having accepted the form of their pursuit they more easily accept its constraints and all the more that the constraints of the regiment will be less for the young officer who recently was at Saint-Cyr, and for the young ministrant in the rural parish who recently was in the great seminary.—It is quite the reverse for the 75,000 other internes of public or private establishments, ecclesiastic or secular, for the future engineers, doctors, architects, notaries, attorneys, advocates and other men of the law, functionaries, land-owners, chiefs and assistants in industry, agriculture and commerce. For them the internat affords precisely the opposite education required for a secular and civil career. These carry away from the prolonged internat a sufficient supply of Latin or of mathematics; but they are lacking in two acquisitions of capital import: they have been deprived of two indispensable experiences. On entering society the young man is ignorant of its two principal personages, man and woman, as they are and as he is about to meet them in society. He has no idea of them, or rather he has only a preconceived, arbitrary and false conception of them.—He has not dined, commonly, with a lady, head of the house, along with her daughters and often with other ladies; their tone of voice, their deportment at table, their toilette, their greater reserve, the attentions they receive, the air of politeness all around, have not impressed on his imagination the faintest lines of an exact notion; hence, there is something wanting in him in relation to how he should demean himself; he does not know how to address them, feels uncomfortable in their presence; they are strange beings to him, new, of an unknown species.—In a like situation, at table in the evening, he has never heard men conversing together: he has not gathered in the thousand bits of information which a young growing mind derives from general conversation:

* about careers in life, competition, business, money, the domestic fireside and expenses;

* about the cost of living which should always depend on income;

* about the gain which nearly always indicates the current rates of labor and of the social subjection one undergoes;

* about the pressing, powerful, personal interests which are soon to seize him by the collar and perhaps by the throat;

* about the constant effort required the incessant calculation, the daily struggle which, in modern society, makes up the life of an ordinary man.

All means of obtaining knowledge have been denied him, the contact with living and diverse men, the images which the sensations of his eyes and ears might have stamped on his brain. These images constitute the sole materials of a correct, healthy conception; through them, spontaneously and gradually, without too many deceptions or shocks, he might have figured social life to himself, such as it is, its conditions, difficulties, and its opportunities: he has neither the sentiment of it nor even a premonition. In all matters, that which we call common sense is never but an involuntary latent summary, the lasting, substantial and salutary depot left in our minds after many direct impressions. With reference to social life, he has been deprived of all these direct impressions and the precious depot has never been formed in him.—e He has scarcely ever conversed with his professors; their talk with him has been about impersonal and abstract matters, languages, literature and mathematics. He has spoken but little with his teachers, except to contest an injunction or grumble aloud against reproof. Of real conversation, the acquisition and exchange of ideas, he has enjoyed none, except with his comrades: if, like him, all are internes, they can communicate to each other only their ignorance. If day-scholars are admitted, they are active smugglers or willing agents who bring into the house and circulate forbidden books and obscene journals, along with the filthy provocative and foul atmosphere of the streets.—Now, with excitement of this kind or in this manner, the brains of these captives, as puberty comes on and deliverance draws near, work actively and we know in what sense6359 and in what counter-sense, how remote from observable and positive truth, how their imagination pictures society, man and woman, under what simple and coarse appearances, with what inadequacy and presumption, what appetites of liberated serfs and juvenile barbarians, how, as concerns women, their precocious and turbid dreams first become brutal and cynical,6360 how, as concerns men, their unballasted and precipitous thought easily becomes chimerical and revolutionary.6361 The downhill road is steep on the bad side, so that, to put on the brake and stop, then to remount the hill, the young man who takes the management of his life into his own hands, must know how to use his own will and persevere to the end.

But a faculty is developed only by exercise, and the French internat is the engine the most effective for hindering the exercise of this one.—The youth, from the first to the last day of his internat, has never been able to deliberate on, choose and decide what he should do at any one hour of his schooldays; except to idle away time in study-hours, and pay no attention at recitations, he could not exercise his will. Nearly every act, especially his outward attitudes, postures, immobility, silence, drill and promenades in rank, is only obedience to orders. He has lived like a horse in harness, between the shafts of his cart; this cart itself, kept straight by its two wheels, must not leave the rectilinear ruts hollowed out and traced for it along the road; it is impossible for the horse to turn aside. Besides, every morning he is harnessed at the same hour, and every evening he is unharnessed at the same hour; every day, at other hours, he has to rest and take his ration of hay and oats. He has never been under the necessity of thinking about all this, nor of looking ahead or on either side; from one end of the year to the other, he has simply had to pull along guided by the bridle or urged by the whip, his principal motives being only of two kinds: on the one hand more or less hard guidance and urgings, and on the other hand his recalcitrance, laziness and fatigue; he has been obliged to choose between the two. For eight or ten years, his initiative is reduced to that—no other employment of his free will. The education of his free will is thus rudimentary or nonexistent.

On the strength of this our (French) system supposes that it is complete and perfect. We cast the bridle on the young man's neck and hand him over to his own government. We admit that, by extraordinary grace, the scholar has suddenly become a man; that he is capable of prescribing and following his own orders; that he has accustomed himself to weighing the near and remote consequences of his acts, of imputing them to himself, of believing himself responsible for them; that his conscience, suddenly emancipated, and his reason, suddenly adult, will march straight on athwart temptations and immediately recover from slips. Consequently, he is set free with an allowance in some great city; he registers himself under some Faculty and becomes one among ten thousand other students on the sidewalks of Paris.—Now, in France, there is no university police force to step in, as at Bonn or GÖttingen, at Oxford or Cambridge, to watch his conduct and punish him in the domicile and in public places. At the schools of medicine, Law, Pharmacy, Fine-Arts, Charters, and Oriental Languages, at the Sorbonne and at the École Centrale, his emancipation is sudden and complete. When he goes from secondary education to superior education he does not, as in England and in Germany, pass from restricted liberty to one less restricted, but from a monastic discipline to compete independence. In a furnished room, in the promiscuity and incognito of a common hotel, scarcely out of college, the novice of twenty years finds at hand the innumerable temptations of the streets, the taverns, the bars, public balls, obscene publications, chance acquaintances, and the liaisons of the gutter. Against all this his previous education has disarmed him. Instead of creating a moral force within him, the long and strict internat has maintained moral debility. He yields to opportunity, to example; he goes with the current, he floats without a rudder, he lets himself drift. As far as hygiene, or money, or sex, is concerned, his mistakes and his follies, great or small, are almost inevitable, while it is an average chance if, during his three, four or five years of full license, he does not become entirely corrupt.