the novels of Ferdinand Fabre ("L'abbe Tigrane," "les Courbezons,"
"Lucifer,," "Barnabe," "Mon Oncle Celestin," "Xaviere," "Ma Vocation").]

BOOK SIXTH. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION.

CHAPTER I. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

I. Public instruction and its three effects.

Public instruction and its three effects.--Influences of the
master, of the pupils on each other, and of discipline.
--Case in which all three tend towards producing a particular
type of man.

AT fixed intervals a man, in a room, gathers around him children,
youths, a group of young people, ten, twenty, thirty or more; he talks
to them for one or two hours and they listen to him. They sit alongside
of each other, look in each other's faces, touch each other's elbows,
feel that they are class-mates, of the same age and occupied with the
same tasks. They form a society and in two ways, one with another and
all with the master. Hence they live under a statute: every society has
one of its own, spontaneous or imposed on it; as soon as men, little or
big, come together in any number, in a drawing-room, in a cafe, in the
street, they find themselves subject to a local charter, a sort of code
which prescribes to them, or interdicts a certain sort of conduct. And
so with the school: positive rules along with many tacit rules are
here observed and these form a mould which stamps on minds and souls a
lasting imprint. Whatever a public lesson may be, whatever its object,
secular or ecclesiastic, whether its subject-matter is religious or
scientific, from the bottom to the top of the scale, from the primary
school and the catechism up to the great seminary, in upper schools and
in the faculties, we find in abridgment the academic institution. Of all
social engines, it is probably the most powerful and the most efficient;
for it exercises three kinds of influence on the young lives it enfolds
and directs, one through the teacher, another through the fellow
students and the last through rules and regulations.

On the one hand, the master, considered a scholar, teaches with
authority and the pupils, who feel that they are ignorant, learn with
confidence.--On the other hand, outside of his family and the domestic
circle, the student finds in his group of comrades a new, different
and complete world which has its own ways and customs, its own sense of
honor and its own vices, its own view of things (esprit de corps),
in which independent and sp