ds 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 lycee 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 lycee 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 Besancon, 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 n