awing out his watch, could
exclaim with satisfaction,

"At this very time, in such a class, all the scholars of the Empire are
studying a certain page in Virgil."

Well--informed, judicious, impartial and even kindly-disposed
foreigners,[6157] on seeing this mechanism which everywhere substitutes
for the initiative from below the compression and impetus from above,
are very much surprised. "The law means that the young shall never for
one moment be left to themselves; the children are under their masters'
eyes all day" and all night. Every step outside of the regulations is
a false one and always arrested by the ever-present authority. And, in
cases of infraction, punishments are severe; "according to the gravity
of the case,[6158] the pupils will be punished by confinement from three
days to three months in the lycee or college, in some place assigned to
that purpose; if fathers, mothers or guardians object to these measures,
the pupil must be sent home and can no longer enter any other college
or lycee belonging to the university, which, as an effect of university
monopoly, thereafter deprives him of instruction, unless his parents are
wealthy enough to employ a professor at home. "Everything that can be
effected by rigid discipline is thus obtained[6159] and better, perhaps,
in France than in any other country," for if, on leaving the lycee,
young people have lost a will of their own, they have acquired "a
love of and habits of subordination and punctuality" which are lacking
elsewhere.

Meanwhile, on this narrow and strictly defined road, whilst the
regulation supports them, emulation pushes them on. In this respect, the
new university corps, which, according to Napoleon himself, must be a
company of "lay Jesuits," resumes to its advantage the double process
which its forerunners, the former Jesuits, had so well employed
in education. On the one hand, constant direction and incessant
watchfulness; on the other hand, the appeal to amour-propre and to the
excitements of parades before the public. If the pupil works hard, it is
not for the purpose of learning and knowing, but to be the first in his
class; the object is not to develop in him the need of truthfulness and
the love of knowledge, but his memory, taste and literary talent; at
best, the logical faculty of arrangement and deduction, but especially
the desire to surpass his rivals, to distinguish himself, to shine, at
first in the little public of his compan