The committee of examiners which admits a candidate to St. Cyr appoints an officer. The committee which admits a candidate to the _Ecole Polytechnique_ appoints an officer or an engineer. A committee also which refuses a candidate at either of these places is encroaching on the National Sovereignty, because it is forbidding the National Sovereignty to make of this young man an officer or an engineer. This is co-optation. This is a guarantee of efficiency. Here a wall is raised against incompetence, and against the jobbery under which incompetence would profit. It is hardly necessary for me to add that this co-optation is limited to a very narrow field of operation. It is confined in fact to the threshold of a man's career. Once the candidate has been consecrated official, by a board of examining officials, he belongs, both as regards advancement, promotion and the reverse, to the central authority alone, except in certain cases. The co-optation of officials is merely a co-optation by elimination. The elimination is made once and for all, and the non-eliminated (_i.e._, the successful candidate) steps at once into the toils of the Government, that is, into the toils of popular electioneering and party politics, when all the abuses which I have enumerated can and do arise. To be fair I had of course to point out that we had tried to invent some slight barriers against the omnipotence of incompetence, which prevent it being absolutely supreme. Unfortunately these prophylactic measures are very badly organised, and, far from being capable of amendment, ought to be completely revolutionised. The examination system in our country is founded on a misconception, I mean on the confusion between knowledge and competence. We search conscientiously for competence or efficiency, and we believe that we have found it when we find knowledge, but that is an error. An examination requires from a candidate that he shall know, and competition demands that he shall know more than the others, but that is almost all that examination and competition require of him. Therefrom results one of the most painful open sores of our civilisation,--preparation for examinations. Preparation for examination is responsible for intellectual indigestion, for minds overloaded with useless information, and for a system of cramming, which at once takes the heart out of men, perhaps with good ability, just at the age when their mental activity is most keen; which, further, as the result of this surfeit, disgusts for the rest of his life and renders impotent for all intellectual effort, the unfortunate patient who has been condemned to undergo this treatment for five, eight, and sometimes ten years of his youth.