Still, in many French families, the father is anxious to do what he can, and this is one of his strongest reasons against clerical education in the ecclesiastical seminaries. The clerical teachers, in their desire to establish an uncontested religious influence over the boys, look upon the father and mother as rivals, and do not permit the boys to return home, except during the vacations, even when the parents live in the very town where the seminary itself is situated. In this way home influence is almost annihilated, and clerical influence substituted for it. But the moralising and civilising power of the home influence may be too precious to be sacrificed, and, as a matter of fact, when the children are educated by laymen, it is almost the only influence of that kind that remains. In France it is especially the mother who civilises boys. Lads who are too much shut up in the _lycées_ may get what the French call “instruction,” but they do not get what is called “education.” The pupils imprisoned in the ecclesiastical seminaries acquire, certainly, an oily smoothness of manner and a much greater degree of docility than the _lycéens_, because they have been more thoroughly broken in. [Sidenote: Home Influences undervalued in England.] [Sidenote: Parents and Schoolmasters.] [Sidenote: Brief Duration of Paternal Influence.] In England the home influences are much undervalued. Wealthy English parents soon despair of doing anything themselves for the moral training of their children, so they “pack them off” to some distant school to be placed under the influence of masters whom they have never seen and of whom nothing is really known except that they are in holy orders. If an Englishman has been educated at home, or even near home, he is generally rather ashamed of it, and unless he is exceptionally forcible in after life he is likely to be despised for it. Still, the boy must be born in very unfortunate circumstances whose father and mother could not, if they chose, do more for his moral training than a schoolmaster who has perhaps fifty to attend to without the parental interest in any of them. The worst of the distant-school system is that it deprives the home residence that remains of all beneficial discipline, for the boys are guests during the holidays, and the great business is to amuse them. Then they go away to follow some profession, and the father, as he thinks over his fond dreams of companionship and paternal influence, may reckon (if the now useless calculation can still interest him) for how many months or weeks that influence has been directly operative in the whole course of his children’s lives. [Sidenote: English Grammar Schools.] [Sidenote: Benefits of Rural Life for Boys.]