As to its ulterior evolution, I may designate two forms which the system has been invited to assume. Rather, I may point to an epoch in its history, at which general and universal education divided off into two lines; and, by one or other way, almost all the secondary and superior education, which prevails amongst us, reaches our present time. The principles adopted on one side, however extravagant they may have been at their first adoption and in all the glow and fervor of a new departure, will certainly recommend themselves to some. The other was practically, if it has not as yet been formally, adopted by the Order as a continuation of its old method, and as a revision in the nineteenth century of what itself had laid down in the fifteenth. I will quote, to explain one of the movements, a writer, M. Drevon, whom I cited once before,[350] chiefly because he is quite recent, and also because he is entirely out of sympathy with the system of the Jesuits. For the other, I will quote one of the latest Generals of the Society of Jesus, Father John Roothaan. When the Jesuit colleges, more than ninety in number, were abruptly closed in France, then, says the first writer, "the departure of the Jesuits was the occasion of a noisy demonstration against the instruction which had been imparted in the colleges. A multitude of books[351] were at once seen pouring into the market, presenting plans for a new system of education, which should be more in keeping with the progress of Science and Philosophy. Men of the gravest authority, like the President Roland, did not disdain to occupy themselves with these matters, and to enter into details: 'The moment was come,' cried one of them, 'to set up furnaces, to add bellows thereto, and initiate scholars into the doctrine of gases.'[352] The reaction was so much the more violent, as spirits had been the longer suppressed. It went even beyond the just measure, as happens almost always in such circumstances; so that, says a contemporary writer,[353] children, properly instructed, ought to have become, at the age of fifteen, agriculturists sufficiently well qualified, intelligent naturalists, prudent economists, shrewd business men, enlightened politicians, profound metaphysicians, prodigious geometricians, without prejudice to writing and drawing, to universal geography, and ancient as well as modern history; without prejudice to the French language, English also and German and a little Latin; and again without prejudice to music and heraldry, to dancing and fencing, to horsemanship, and, above all, to swimming. But people had not long to wait before deploring such excess. All this agitation proved unfortunately sterile; and as I have just said, on the eve of the French Revolution, secondary education had not taken a step forward during fifty years....