apoleon in his final step, and neither the
theory nor the method need be again discussed. It is significant that
it was an imperial decree, and not a statute, which on March
seventeenth, 1808, created the organism. There was an endowment of
four hundred million francs, and a separate budget, "in order that
instruction might not suffer by passing disturbances in imperial
finances." In order, also, that its doctrine might not feel the
influence of every passing philosophical fashion, the corporation was
subordinate to, but separate from, the ministry, with a grand master,
chancellor, and treasurer of its own, and thirty members, of whom ten
were appointed for life by the Emperor, the rest being annually
designated by the grand master. They made rules for the discipline,
revised the textbooks, and chose the instructors of all the
institutions of learning in all France, except some of the great
ecclesiastical seminaries and a few of the technical schools. At the
outset it was ordered that all the masters, censors, and teachers in
the great intermediate schools or lyceums should be celibates! The
professors might marry, but in that case they could not live in the
precincts of what was virtually a military barrack.

Liberal culture, so far as given, was provided in the lyceums, and
they really form the heart of the university. Under the Empire their
instruction was largely in mathematics, with a sprinkling of Latin. It
is now greatly broadened and elevated. The pupils of the primary
schools felt a quasi-dependence on the Emperor; those of the lyceums
were the very children of patronage, for the cheapness of their
education, combined with their semi-military uniforms and habits,
impressed at every turn on them and their families the immanence of
the Empire. They entered by government examinations; all their letters
passed through the head master's hands; they were put under a
threefold system of espionage culminating in the grand master; the one
hundred and fifty scholarships and bourses in each were paid by the
state; the punishments were, like those of soldiers, arrest and
imprisonment. With the acquisition of military habits the young
_lyceen_ could look forward to military promotion, for two hundred and
fifty of the most select were sent every year to the military schools,
where they lived at the Emperor's expense, expecting professional
advancement by the Emperor's patronage. Others of less merit were
detached for the ci