hese schools remarked
with great satisfaction and still greater naivete: "This school is
superior to all others of its kind in Europe, for nowhere else is what
we teach taught in the same number of years."]

[Footnote 6380: But what if Taine was mistaken? What if he, like so
many other highly talented and intelligent men, took his own superb
intelligence and imagination for granted? What if the talent of such
men is inherited? We know from identical twins how many of our
particularities have been given to us at birth. What if most men are
lazy and especially intellectually so, what if we can only be made to
learn and think when under great stress, the stress introduced by fear
of dismissal or hope of promotion or riches? Then the French system is
perhaps hard, perhaps expensive but certainly useful in producing
the great number of hardworking and competent and passively obedient
supervisors and civil servants that any large organization needs. (SR.)]

[Footnote 6381: "Souvenirs", by Pasquier (Etienne-Dennis, duc),
chancelier de France, in VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. Although
pupils were admitted in the preparatory Schools very early, "our navy,
engineer and artillery officers were justly esteemed the best instructed
in Europe, as able practically as theoretically; the position occupied
by artillery and engineer officers from 1792 in the French army
sufficiently attests this truth. And yet they did not know one tenth of
those who now issue from the preparatory schools. Vauban himself would
have been unable to undergo the examination for admission into the
Polytechnic School." There is then in our system "a luxury of science,
very fine in itself, but which is not necessary to insure good service
on land or at sea." The same in civil careers, with the bar, in the
magistracy, in the administration and even in literature and the
sciences. The proof of this is found in the men of great talent who,
after 1789, were prominent in the Constituent Assembly. In the new-born
University there was not one half of the demand for attainments as is
now exacted. There is nothing like our over-loaded baccalaureat, and yet
there issued from it Villemain, Cousin, Hugo, Lamartine, etc. No Ecole
Polytechnique existed, and yet at the end of the eighteenth century in
France, we find the richest constellation of savants, Lagrange, Laplace,
Monge, Fourcroy, Lavoisier, Berthollet, Hauey, and others. (Since the
date of these souvenirs (1