families.[6382] Now, in the four Faculties of Law, Medicine, Science and Letters, there are this year 22,000 students; add to these the pupils of the special schools and those who study with the hope of entering them, in all probably 30,000. But there is no need of counting them; since the suppression of the one-year voluntariat, the entire body of youths capable of study, who wish to remain only one year in barracks and not remain there to get brutalized during three years, flocks to the benches of the lycée or to those of a Faculty.[6383] The sole object of the young man is not, as before, to reach the baccalauréat; it is essential that he should be admitted, after a competition, into one of the special schools, or obtain the highest grades or diplomas in one of the Faculties; in all cases he is bound to successfully undergo difficult and multiplied examinations. At present time (1890), there is no place in France for an education in the inverse sense, nor for any other of a different type. Henceforth, no young man, without condemning himself to three years of barrack life, can travel at an early age for any length of time, or form his mind at home by free and original studies, stay in Germany and follow speculative studies in the universities, or go to England or to America to derive practical instruction from factory or farm. Captured by our system, he is forced to surrender himself to the mechanical routine which fills his mind with fictitious tools, with useless and cumbersome acquisitions that impose on him in exchange an exorbitant expenditure of mental energy and which is very like to convert him into a mandarin. V. Public instruction in 1890. Public instruction since 1870.--Agreement between the Napoleonic and Jacobin conception.--Extension and aggravation of the system.--The deductive process of the Jacobin mind.--Its consequences.--In superior and in secondary instruction.--In primary instruction.--Gratuitous, obligatory and secular instruction.