head of it. Let it be noted that he is not an opponent, an
irregular: M. de Fontaines himself praises his teaching, his excellent
mind, his perfect exactitude, and calls him the universitarian of the
university. But he does not belong to it, he stands aloof and stays
at home, he is not disposed to become a mere cog-wheel in the imperial
manufactory. Therefore, whether he is aware of it or not, he does
it harm and all the more according to his prosperity; his full house
empties the lycees; the more pupils he has the less they have. Private
enterprises in their essence enter into competition with public
enterprise.

For this reason, if tolerated by the latter, it is reluctantly and
because nothing else can be done; there are too many of them; the money
and the means to replace them at one stroke would be wanting. Moreover,
with instruction, the consumers, as with other supplies and commodities,
naturally dislike monopoly; they must be gradually brought to it;
resignation must come to them through habit. The State, accordingly, may
allow private enterprises to exist, at least for the time being. But,
on condition of their being kept in the strictest dependence, of its
arrogating to itself the right over them of life and death, of reducing
them to the state of tributaries and branches, of utilizing them, of
transforming their native and injurious rivalry into a fruitful and
forced collaboration. Not only must private schools obtain from the
State its express consent to be born, for lack of which they are closed
and their principals punished,[6110] but again, even when licensed, they
live subject to the good-will of the Grand-Master, who can and must
close them as soon as he recognizes in them "grave abuses and principles
contrary to those professed by the University." Meanwhile, the
University supports itself with their funds; since it alone has the
right to teach, it may profit by this right, concede for money the
faculty of teaching or of being taught alongside of it, oblige every
head of an institution to pay so much for himself and so much for
each of his pupils; in sum, here as elsewhere, in derogation of the
university blockade, as with the continental blockade, the state sells
licenses to certain parties. So true is this that, even with superior
instruction, when nobody competes with it, it sells them: every graduate
who gives a course of lectures on literature or on science must pay
beforehand, for the year, 75 fra