h are the average returns--assuredly, the
profits do not make up for the expenses. In England and in America
where, as before 1789 in France, the inverse method is followed, the
returns are equal or superior,[6381] and they are obtained with greater
facility, with more certainty, at an age less tardy, without imposing
such great and unhealthy efforts on the young man, such large
expenditure by the State, and such long delays and sacrifices on
families.[6382]

Now, in the four Faculties of Law, Medicine, Science and Letters, there
are this year 22,000 students; add to these the pupils of the special
schools and those who study with the hope of entering them, in all
probably 30,000. But there is no need of counting them; since the
suppression of the one-year voluntariat, the entire body of youths
capable of study, who wish to remain only one year in barracks and not
remain there to get brutalized during three years, flocks to the benches
of the lycee or to those of a Faculty.[6383] The sole object of the
young man is not, as before, to reach the baccalaureat; it is essential
that he should be admitted, after a competition, into one of the
special schools, or obtain the highest grades or diplomas in one of the
Faculties; in all cases he is bound to successfully undergo difficult
and multiplied examinations. At present time (1890), there is no place
in France for an education in the inverse sense, nor for any other of a
different type. Henceforth, no young man, without condemning himself to
three years of barrack life, can travel at an early age for any length
of time, or form his mind at home by free and original studies, stay
in Germany and follow speculative studies in the universities, or go to
England or to America to derive practical instruction from factory or
farm. Captured by our system, he is forced to surrender himself to the
mechanical routine which fills his mind with fictitious tools, with
useless and cumbersome acquisitions that impose on him in exchange
an exorbitant expenditure of mental energy and which is very like to
convert him into a mandarin.

V. Public instruction in 1890.

Public instruction since 1870.--Agreement between the
Napoleonic and Jacobin conception.--Extension and
aggravation of the system.--The deductive process of the
Jacobin mind.--Its consequences.--In superior and in
secondary instruction.--In primary instruction.--Gratuitous,
obligatory and se