ames.--Owing to this our
internats, those huge stone boxes set up and isolated in each large
town, those lycees parceled out to hold three hundred, four hundred,
even eight hundred boarders, with immense dormitories, refectories and
playgrounds, recitation-rooms full to overflowing, and, for eight or ten
years, for one half of our children and youths, an anti-social unnatural
system apart, strict confinement, no going out except to march in
couples under the eyes of a sub-teacher who maintains order in the
ranks, promiscuity and life in common, exact and minute regularity under
equal discipline and constant constraint in order to eat, sleep, study,
play, promenade and the rest,--in short, COMMUNISM.

From the University this system is propagated among its rivals. In
conferring grades and passing examinations, it arranges and overburdens
the school program of study; hence, it incites in others what it
practices at home, the over-training of youth, and a factitious,
hot-house education. On the other hand, the internat is, for those who
decide on that, less troublesome than the day-school;[6356] also,
the more numerous the boarders in any one establishment, the less
the expense; thus, in order to exist in the face of the university
establishments, there must be internats and internats that are full.
Ecclesiastical establishments willingly resign themselves to all this;
they are even inclined that way; the Jesuits were the first ones, under
the old monarchy, who introduced cloistered and crowded boarding-houses.
In its essence, the Catholic church, like the French State, is a Roman
institution, still more exclusive and more governmental, resolved to
seize, hold on to, direct and control man entirely, and, first of all,
the child, head and heart, opinions and impressions, in order to stamp
in him and lastingly the definitive and salutary forms which are for him
the first condition of salvation. Consequently, the ecclesiastical cage
is more strict in its confinement than the secular cage; if the bars are
not so strong and not so rough, the grating, finer and more yielding, is
more secure, closer and better maintained; they do not allow any holes
or relaxation of the meshes; the precautions against worldly and family
interference, against the mistakes and caprices of individual effort,
are innumerable, and form a double or even triple network. For, to
school discipline is added religious discipline, no less compulsory,
just as