Plato had put it down that "he who hath a good soul is good"; and he insisted that no youth, who has had a personal acquaintance with evil, can have a good soul. He did not mean that a youth must be ignorant of what temptation is. There is no hot-house raising in this world which will keep off that blast. Every child, while keeping on the royal road of innocence, has enough in himself, and in the choicest of surroundings, to know the realities of life and its warfare. But Plato refers to a personal experience of the by-ways, which are not virtue, and which it is not necessary to travel by, in order to know enough about them. The educational means, the industry, the vigilance, which have for a result the preservation of youth in the freshness of innocence, signify a medium of respiration which is kept pure, and a moral nutriment which is good and is kept constantly supplied, until tender virtue has risen steadily into a well-knit rectitude, and is able thenceforth to brave manfully the incidental storms of life. For this moral strengthening of character, no less than for the invigorating of mental energies, the system of Ignatius Loyola prescribes an education which is public,--public, as being that of many students together, public as opposed to private tutorism, public, in fine, as requiring a sufficiency of the open, fearless exercise both of practical morality and of religion. Since the time of Ignatius, Dupanloup has observed on this subject:-- "I have heard a man of great sense utter this remarkable word. 'If a usurping and able government wanted to get rid of great races in the country, and root them out, it need only come down to this, that it require of them, out of respect for themselves, to bring up their children at home, alone, far from their equals, shut up in the narrow horizon of a private education and a private tutor.'"[97] The youthful material, on which the Jesuit system had to work, may be described from two points of view. There were home conditions; and there were conditions too of the educational system, which was commonly prevalent in those centuries. As to the circumstances of polite society at the boys' homes, Charles Lenormant, speaking of those times, tells us that "it was the privilege of a gentleman to have from his infancy the responsibility of his own actions. The fathers of families were the first to launch their sons into the midst of the perils of the world, even before the age of discernment had begun."[98] Even when boys' homes effect no positive harm, still, only too often, they answer this description, that they undo the best of what the school training is endeavoring to effect, by the discipline of subordination and the practice of obedience.