a strong majority, passed the law, without introducing any important modification. The Liberty of Instruction was founded. {106} Fifteen years have passed, and it subsists. The State, the Church, private institutions founded by laymen or by ecclesiastics, have competed actively during all that period. Religious congregations, Lazarists, Dominicans, Oratorians, Jesuits, have in this struggle displayed all the enthusiasm of faith, all the ardor of reciprocal rivalry. The Jesuits, since the year 1850, have opened twenty colleges for secondary instruction, and have founded at Paris, for courses of study preparatory to the special schools, an establishment whose successes have attracted the attention of the government and of the public; for it sends every year to the Military Schools, the Polytechnic, Naval, or Central, an extraordinary number of successful candidates, who have passed with honor, although the competition has been extensive and the examinations are severe. {107} A great school, founded by the Archbishop of Paris for the higher branches of ecclesiastical study in the ancient house of the Carmelites, has formed priests who, in the public examinations and theses, have proved themselves capable of taking rank by the side of the best pupils of the lay establishment of the "École Normale Supérieure." Everywhere the University has encountered numerous and ardent rivals; and it has been at the same time in its own interior a prey to painful trials. Under the pretext of an interest for studies of a scientific and practical nature, classical and philosophical studies have been displaced and depreciated. At the very moment that the University was losing its privileges beyond, it saw its principles and its organization shaken inside its walls. Faithful to her convictions and traditions, even while accepting the experiments and the struggles that were forced upon her, the University has surmounted perils from within and rivalries from without; on the one side, little by little, it has returned to its system of a large and solid teaching of the classics; on the other, the level of the studies in its principal establishments has been raised, and the number of its pupils has been ever on the increase. {108} The Lycées counted (in 1850) 19,300; they have now (1865) more than 30,000 pupils. The State has thrown open the career of instruction to the Church, and has at the same time redoubled its own solicitude and success. Liberty of instruction has calmed both the anxieties of the religious party that made them demand it, and those anxieties of the laity which that liberty had inspired. It has given peace to the State and to the Church, at the same time that it has excited their emulation and stimulated their progress.