rigid and more constant--daily pious exercises, ordinary
devotions and extraordinary ceremonies, spiritual guidance, influence of
the confessional and the example and behavior of a staff kept together
around the same work by the same faith. The closer the atmosphere, the
more powerful the action; the chances are that the latter will prove
decisive on the child sequestered, sheltered and brought up in a retort,
and that its intellect, faith and ideas, carefully cultivated, pruned
and always under direction, will exactly reproduce the model aimed
at.--For this reason, in 1876, 33,000 out of 46,000 pupils belonging
to the 309 ecclesiastical establishments of secondary instruction, are
internes,[6357] and the Catholic authorities admit that, in the 86 small
seminaries, no day-scholars, no future lay persons, are necessary.

This conclusion is perhaps reasonable in relation to the 23,000
pupils of the small seminaries, and for the 10,000 pupils in the great
seminaries; it is perhaps reasonable also for the future military
officers formed by the State at La Fleche, Saint-Cyr, Saumur, and on the
Borda.[6358] Whether future soldiers or future priests, their education
fits them for the life they are to lead; what they are to become as
adults, they already are as youths and children; the internat, under a
convent discipline or that of the barracks, qualifies them beforehand
for their profession. Since they must possess the spirit of it they must
contract its habits. Having accepted the form of their pursuit they more
easily accept its constraints and all the more that the constraints
of the regiment will be less for the young officer who recently was at
Saint-Cyr, and for the young ministrant in the rural parish who recently
was in the great seminary.--It is quite the reverse for the 75,000 other
internes of public or private establishments, ecclesiastic or secular,
for the future engineers, doctors, architects, notaries, attorneys,
advocates and other men of the law, functionaries, land-owners, chiefs
and assistants in industry, agriculture and commerce. For them the
internat affords precisely the opposite education required for a
secular and civil career. These carry away from the prolonged internat
a sufficient supply of Latin or of mathematics; but they are lacking
in two acquisitions of capital import: they have been deprived of two
indispensable experiences. On entering society the young man is ignorant
of its two principal