w their
genius the moment they rise from practice to theory. Stephenson
and MacAdam did not come from schools like ours.

But what is the good of talking? When a few young and able
engineers, full of ardor, solve, at the outset of their career,
the problem of maintaining the roads of France, which need some
hundred millions spent upon them every quarter of a century (and
which are now in a pitiable state), they gain nothing by making
known in reports and memoranda their intelligent knowledge; it is
immediately engulfed in the archives of the general Direction,--
that Parisian centre where everything enters and nothing issues;
where old men are jealous of young ones, and all the posts of
management are used to shelve old officers or men who have
blundered.

This is why, with a body of scientific men spread all over the
face of France and constituting a part of the administration,--a
body which ought to enlighten every region on the subject of its
resources,--this is why we are still discussing the practicability
of railroads while other countries are making theirs. If ever
France was to show the excellence of her institution of technical
schools, it should have been in this magnificent phase of public
works, which is destined to change the face of States and nations,
to double human life, and modify the laws of space and time.
Belgium, the United States of America, England, none of whom have
an Ecole Polytechnique, will be honeycombed with railroads when
French engineers are still surveying ours, and selfish interests,
hidden behind all projects, are hindering their execution.

Thus I say that as for the State, it derives no benefit from its
technical schools; as for the individual pupil of those schools,
his earnings are poor, his ambition crushed, and his life a cruel
deception. Most assuredly the powers he has displayed between
sixteen and twenty-six years of age would, if he had been cast
upon his own resources, have brought him more fame and more wealth
than the government in whom he trusted will ever give him. As a
commercial man, a learned man, a military man, this choice
intellect would have worked in a vast centre where his precious
faculties and his ardent ambition would not be idiotically and
prematurely repressed.

Where, then, is progress? Man and State are both kept backward by
this system. Does not the experience of a whole