oluntarily gathered in and silently elaborated, work together
in him and suggest, sooner or later, this or that new combination,
economy, perfection or invention.[6374] The young Frenchman, just at
this fecund age, is deprived of all these precious contacts, of all
these assimilating and indispensable elements. During seven or eight
years, he is shut up in school, remote from the direct and personal
experience which might have given him an exact and vivifying notion of
men and things, and of the various ways of handling them. All this time
his inventive faculties are deliberately sterilized; he can be nothing
but a passive recipient; whatever he might have produced under the other
system he cannot produce under this one; the balance of debit and
credit is utter loss.--Meanwhile, the cost has been great. Whilst the
apprentice, the clerk busy with his papers in his office, the interne
with his apron standing by the bedside of the patient in the hospital,
pays by his services, at first for his instruction, then for his
breakfast, and ends in gaining something besides, at least his
pocket-money, the student under the Faculty, or the pupil in a special
school is educated and lives at the expense of his family or of the
State; he gives back in exchange not work that is useful to mankind,
none that is worth anything on the market; his actual consumption is not
compensated for by his actual production. Undoubtedly, he cherishes the
hope that some day or other he will obtain compensation, that we will
refund later and largely both capital and interest, and all the advances
made; in other words, his future services are discounted and, as far as
he is concerned, he speculates on a long credit.--It remains to be seen
whether the speculation is a good one; whether, at last, the receipts
will cover the expenses, in short, what will be the net or average
returns on the man thus fashioned.[6375]

Now, among the forces expended, the most important to take into account
is the time and attention of the pupil, the sum of his efforts, this or
that quantity of mental energy; he has only a limited provision of
this, and, not only is the proportion of this which the system consumes
excessive, but, again, the application of it which the system enforces
is not remunerative. The provision is exhausted and by a wrong use of
it, with scarcely any profit.--In our lycees, the pupil sits at his task
more than eleven hours a day; in a certain ecclesiast