When I entered the Ecole Polytechnique, I worked harder than ever and with even more ardor, in order to leave it as triumphantly as I had entered it. From nineteen to twenty-one I developed every aptitude and strengthened every faculty by constant practice. Those two years were the crown and completion of the first three, during which I had only prepared myself to do well. Therefore my pride was great when I won the right to choose the career that pleased me most,--either military or naval engineering, artillery, or staff duty, or the civil engineering of mining, and _ponts et chaussees_.[*] By your advice, I chose the latter. [*] Department of the government including everything connected with the making and repairing of roads, bridges, canals, etc. But where I triumphed how many others fail! Do you know that from year to year the State increases the scientific requirements of the Ecole? the studies are more severe, more exacting yearly. The preparatory studies which tried me so much were nothing to the intense work of the school itself, which has for its object to put the whole of physical science, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and all their nomenclatures into the minds of young men of nineteen to twenty-one years of age. The State, which seems in France to wish to substitute itself in many ways for the paternal authority, has neither bowels of compassion nor fatherhood; it makes its experiments _in anima vili_. Never does it inquire into the horrible statistics of the suffering it causes. Does it know the number of brain fevers among its pupils during the last thirty-six years; or the despair and the moral destruction which decimate its youth? I am pointing out to you this painful side of the State education, for it is one of the anterior contingents of the actual result. You know that scholars whose conceptions are slow, or who are temporarily disabled from excess of mental work, are allowed to remain at the Ecole three years instead of two; they then become the object of suspicions little favorable to their capacity. This often compels young men, who might later show superior capacity, to leave the school without being employed, simply because they could not meet the final examination with the full scientific knowledge required. They are called “dried fruits”; Napoleon made sub-lieutenants of them. To-day the “dried fruits” constitute an enormous loss of capital to families and of time to individuals.