2108 students, in Poland there were 10,000 young men
chiefly of the nobility, at Rome 2000, at La Fleche 1700. In the
seventeenth century at the College of Louis le Grand, in Paris, the
number varied between 2000 and 3000. In 1627 the Province of Paris had
in fourteen colleges 13,195 students.

The papal seminaries under Gregory XIII, at Vienna, Dillengen, Fulda,
Prague, Graetz, Olmuetz, Wilna, as well as in Japan, were directed by
the Fathers, as also that of Pius V and of St. Charles Borromeo at
Milan.

Taking an average, there were more than two hundred thousand students
being educated in these educational institutions.

A comparison could be made on this basis of the work done by the Order
and that which is accomplished by Oxford.

If Oxford spends annually a revenue of $2,500,000 to supply facilities
for higher education to two thousand of the nobility and gentry, how
much would be required to educate a quarter of a million
students,--not two thousand, but two hundred and fifty thousand?

The fundamental principles in the educational institute of St.
Ignatius were these:--

First, solidity and thoroughness.

The first condition of all higher studies as well as of lower studies
was such that, as St. Ignatius said, "It was useless to begin at the
top, as the edifice without a good foundation would never stand."

Let literature and philosophy be gone through with satisfactorily, and
then theology may be approached.

Literature must come first of all. St. Ignatius provides for law and
medicine, but by professors of law and medicine outside of the Order;
but no professors of the Order were sent for work outside of Jesuit
institutions. If the younger men were sent abroad, the younger
generation would be deprived of that type; and if eminent men were
sent forth without a permanent Jesuit College, the work would not be
that of the Order, but of scattered individuals, and would soon
perish.

In the cause of education St. Ignatius had placed in his charter the
watchwords "Defence and Advance." As a leader of a military type he
had gathered about him the flower of youth and of mature age, from
college and university, from doctor's chair and prince's throne, and
in fifteen years from the foundation of the Order left one hundred
colleges and houses in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Germany,
France, Brazil, and the East Indies. Xavier traveled from India and
Ceylon, in the west, to Malucca, Japan, and the coast of