§ 17. One of the leading peculiarities in the Jesuits’ system was the pains they took to foster emulation—“cotem ingenii puerilis, calcar industriæ—the whetstone of talent, the spur of industry.” For this purpose all the boys in the lower part of the school were arranged in pairs, each pair being rivals (_æmuli_) to one another. Every boy was to be constantly on the watch to catch his rival tripping, and was immediately to correct him. Besides this individual rivalry, every class was divided into two hostile camps, called Rome and Carthage, which had frequent pitched battles of questions on set subjects. These were the “Concertations,” in which the boys sometimes had to put questions to the opposite camp, sometimes to expose erroneous answers when the questions were asked by the master[23] (see Appendix: Class Matches, p. 529). Emulation, indeed, was encouraged to a point where, as it seems to me, it must have endangered the good feeling of the boys among themselves. Jouvency mentions a practice of appointing mock defenders of any particularly bad exercise, who should make the author of it ridiculous by their excuses; and any boy whose work was very discreditable, was placed on a form by himself, with a daily punishment, until he could show that some one deserved to change places with him. § 18. In the higher classes a better kind of rivalry was cultivated by means of “Academies,” _i.e._, voluntary associations for study, which met together, under the superintendence of a master, to read themes, translations, &c., and to discuss passages from the classics. The new members were elected by the old, and to be thus elected was a much-coveted distinction. In these Academies the cleverer students got practice for the disputations, which formed an important part of the school work of the higher classes. § 19. There was a vast number of other expedients by which the Jesuits sought to work on their pupils’ _amour propre_, such as, on the one hand, the weekly publication of offences _per præconem_, and, on the other, besides prizes (which could be won only by the externs), titles and badges of honour, and the like. “There are,” says Jouvency, “hundreds of expedients of this sort, all tending to sharpen the boys’ wits, to lighten the labour of the master, and to free him from the invidious and troublesome necessity of punishing.”