cre subaltern officers, whilst excellent _marechaux des
logis_, intelligent, vigorous, industrious, are refused, because the
blackboard intimidates them, because they design in but a mediocre
fashion, and have, concerning the rivers of Asia, only vague ideas and
perhaps erroneous ones," etc. Captain Gilbert has proposed, in order to
do away with the inconveniences attending this anarchic regime, to
institute, as in Germany, an inspector-general of all the schools, a
sort of high master of the military University. "In any case, it is
necessary to adopt some method that will put an end to a situation that
is truly dangerous."

The greatest danger of all, of course, lies "in the fault of the French
mothers, who do not give to the army soldiers enough," says another
writer, M. Armand Latour, "and, alas! it is to be foreseen that they
will be, in this respect, less and less generous in the future."

Of these military schools, the oldest is the _Ecole superieure de
guerre_ at the _Ecole militaire_, founded by Louis XV in 1751, under the
name of the _Ecole royale militaire_. It was the king's intention to
devote this institution to the education of five hundred young
gentlemen, born without property, and, in preference, those who, having
lost their fathers in battle, had become the children of the State. In
addition to the five hundred young gentlemen, the hotel was to be grand
and spacious enough to receive the officers of the troops to whom the
command was to be confided, the learned professors of every species who
were to be proposed for the instruction and exercise of all those who
would take any part in the spiritual and temporal administration of this
household. The architect Gabriel commenced the construction of the
buildings in the following year on what was then a portion of the plain
of Grenelle, and in the meanwhile the school was opened provisorily in
the Chateau de Vincennes. The architect was soon arrested by want of
funds; but the king applied to these expenses the proceeds of a tax on
playing-cards, those of a lottery,--the favorite method of raising funds
at this period,--and the revenues of the Abbaie de Laon, which was then
vacant. The first stone of the chapel, blessed by the Archbishop of
Paris, was not laid by the king, till 1769. The pupils were admitted in
1756, divided into eight classes; at the age of eighteen or twenty
years, they were graduated, and passed into the royal troops, receiving
a pension