On the strength of this our (French) system supposes that it is complete and perfect. We cast the bridle on the young man's neck and hand him over to his own government. We admit that, by extraordinary grace, the scholar has suddenly become a man; that he is capable of prescribing and following his own orders; that he has accustomed himself to weighing the near and remote consequences of his acts, of imputing them to himself, of believing himself responsible for them; that his conscience, suddenly emancipated, and his reason, suddenly adult, will march straight on athwart temptations and immediately recover from slips. Consequently, he is set free with an allowance in some great city; he registers himself under some Faculty and becomes one among ten thousand other students on the sidewalks of Paris.--Now, in France, there is no university police force to step in, as at Bonn or Göttingen, at Oxford or Cambridge, to watch his conduct and punish him in the domicile and in public places. At the schools of medicine, Law, Pharmacy, Fine-Arts, Charters, and Oriental Languages, at the Sorbonne and at the École Centrale, his emancipation is sudden and complete. When he goes from secondary education to superior education he does not, as in England and in Germany, pass from restricted liberty to one less restricted, but from a monastic discipline to compete independence. In a furnished room, in the promiscuity and incognito of a common hotel, scarcely out of college, the novice of twenty years finds at hand the innumerable temptations of the streets, the taverns, the bars, public balls, obscene publications, chance acquaintances, and the liaisons of the gutter. Against all this his previous education has disarmed him. Instead of creating a moral force within him, the long and strict internat has maintained moral debility. He yields to opportunity, to example; he goes with the current, he floats without a rudder, he lets himself drift. As far as hygiene, or money, or sex, is concerned, his mistakes and his follies, great or small, are almost inevitable, while it is an average chance if, during his three, four or five years of full license, he does not become entirely corrupt. IV. Cramming and Exams Compared to Apprenticeship Another vice of the system.--Starting-point of superior instruction in France.--Substitution of special State schools for free encyclopedic universities.--Effect of this substitution.--Examinations and competitions.--Intense, forced and artificial culture.--How it reaches an extreme. --Excess and prolongation of theoretical studies. --Insufficiency and tardiness of practical apprenticeship. --Comparison of this system with others, between France before 1789 and England and the United States.--Lost forces. --Mistaken use and excessive expenditure of mental energy.-- --The entire body of youth condemned to it after 1889.