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 Goettingen, 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 Ecole 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 yi