When the seven years were past, a boy became for his mother only an object of anxiety or tribulation. He came under the direct and exclusive authority of his father, who aimed at moulding him on large lines and turning him at fourteen, not into a bookish don, nor perhaps a mere ‘pass-man’ even, but into a man of backbone and individuality, armed at all points for the battle of life. Our ancestors had a particular horror of everything resembling enlistment into brigades, reduction to a uniform pattern. The collegiate system seemed to them detestable, a make-shift in the worst sense; Louis XI., though he took care to send the princes of the younger branch to college, just as carefully avoided sending his son there. College, as Montaigne said, was a “factory of Latinizers,” a “house of preventive correction,” where men worked like day-labourers (of that period) fourteen or fifteen hours a day, until their brains were completely addled and they hated the sight of books; and what, if you please, was the magnificent result? A smattering of Greek and Latin, a certain facility in prating about Jupiter, Venus, Pyramus—without too minute an enquiry, happily, into what those august names stood for. As to ideas, they did no more than stuff the boys with a few stock notions to serve for intelligence,[65] instead of vigorously developing the creative and original faculties. Thus there was general agreement that college was to be avoided as much as possible, and that a boy should remain at home. But then came the tug-of-war. If he remained at home, the mother, who had in all probability centred precisely on this son all her affection, would claim him as her care, which is just what the father did not wish; he mistrusted her, her kindness, her “shows of love.” It was an axiom that boys must be subjected to thoroughly masculine management, a life of birching, under the firm hand of the father; the father had a perfect right to forbid them to see their mother. How could he succeed in “hardening the soul and the muscles” of a boy, in giving him a physical and moral robustness depending largely on the “thickness of the skin,” if the mother was always at hand, interfering, discovering that her son had been too hot or too cold, petting him, commiserating his slightest hardships? That was not the way to make a man! Nowhere was the battle against feminism fought more resolutely than on this ground. The adversaries of women may be almost infallibly recognised by this mark, that they insist above all things on keeping in their hands the education of men, because they regard this as the direction in which the influence of women is most manifestly fatal.