been able to adapt themselves to their surroundings
would have had the most vitality; according to a well-known law, they
would have prospered in branching off, each in its own sense and in its
own way.--Now, at this date, after the demolitions of the Revolution,
all pedagogic roads were open and, at each of their starting-points,
the runners were ready, not merely the secular but, again, independent
ecclesiastics, liberal Gallicans, surviving Jansenists, constitutional
priests, enlightened monks, some of them philosophers and half-secular
in mind or even at heart, using Port-Royal manuals, Rollin's "Traite des
Etudes" and Condillac's "Cours d'Etudes," the best-tried and most fecund
methods of instruction, all the traditions of the seventeenth century
from Arnauld to Lancelot and all the novelties of the eighteenth century
from Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all wide-awake or aroused by the
demands of the public and by this unique opportunity and eager to do
and to do well. In the provinces[6338] as at Paris, people were seeking,
trying and groping. There was room and encouragement for original,
sporadic and multiple invention, for schools proportionate with and
suited to various and changing necessities, Latin, mathematical or
mixed schools, some for theoretical science and others for practical
apprenticeship, these commercial and those industrial, from the lowest
standpoint of technical and rapid preparation up to the loftiest summits
of speculative and prolonged study.

On this school world in the way of formation, Napoleon has riveted his
uniformity, the rigorous apparatus of his university, his unique
system, narrow, inflexible, applied from above. We have seen with what
restrictions, with what insistence, with what convergence of means, what
prohibitions, what taxes, what application of the university monopoly,
and with what systematic hostility to private establishments!--In the
towns, and by force, they become branches of the lycee and imitate its
classes; in this way Sainte-Barbe is allowed to subsist at Paris and,
until the abolition of the monopoly, the principal establishments of
Paris, Massin, Jauffrey, Bellaguet, existed only on this condition,
that of becoming auxiliaries, subordinates and innkeepers for lycee
day-scholars; such is still the case to-day for the lycees Bossuet
and Gerson. In the way of education and instruction the little that an
institution thus reduced can preserve of originality and of