o learn Latin and mathematics, for all who
hoped to pursue liberal professions, for the entire generation about to
receive either a superior, a common, or even a primary instruction, and
hence to furnish brains prepared for intellectual work, there was a lack
of this for ten years. Not only were the endowments which provided
for instruction confiscated but the educational staff, nearly all
ecclesiastic, was one of the most proscribed among those proscribed.
Whilst military requisition and the closing of the schools suppressed
the pupils, massacres, banishment, imprisonment, destitution and the
scaffold suppressed the teachers. Whilst the ruin of universities
and colleges did away with theoretical apprenticeship, the ruin of
manufactures and of trade abolished practical apprenticeship. Through
the long interruption of all studies, general instruction as well as
special competency became rare product in the market.--Hence it is that,
in 1800, and during the three or four following years, whoever brought
to market either one the other of these commodities was certain of a
quick sale;[3342] the new government needed them more than anybody. The
moment the seller made up his mind, he was bought, and, whatever he may
be, a former Jacobin or a former emigre; he is employed. If he brings
both commodities and is zealous, he is promptly promoted; if, on
trial, he is found of superior capacity, he will, like Mollien, Gaudin,
Tronchet, Pasquier and Mole, attain to the highest posts, for he finds
scarcely any competitors. These he would have had had things followed
their usual course; it is the Revolution which has cleared the ground
around him; without that the road would have been obstructed; competent
candidates would have swarmed. Reckon, if possible, how many men
of talent who were destroyed, royalists, monarchists, feuillants,
Girondists and even Jacobins. They were the elite of the noblesse, of
the clergy, of the bourgeoisie, of the youth and those of riper age.
Thus rid of their most formidable rivals the survivors pursue their way
at top speed; the guillotine has wrought for them in advance; it has
effected openings in their own ranks, made by bullets in every battle
in the ranks of the army, and, in the civil hierarchy as in the military
hierarchy, merit, if demonstrated by services, or not arrested by death,
reaches the highest summit in very few years.

The prizes offered on these summits are splendid; no attraction is
la