Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/148

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and thrives, and the great desire of the newly married bride, never before permitted to read the fiction of her own land, is to learn what life is through his unmanly and ignoble adventures. Had the boy been trained differently he would have had another ideal, and there would have been some place for noble aspirations and generous sentiment in a heart not yet hardened by squalid cynicism.

The great defect of the lycée system is its impersonality. The Republican professors should borrow a hint from their more successful ecclesiastical rivals, the Marists and Jesuits, and hold their pupils by the influence of personal relations, win them by the direct exercise of moral guidance. There are two courses to adopt in training youth—that followed by the priesthood, which is insidious, and which regards them not as so many young men to be taught how to live and conduct themselves as honourable men, but as so many souls to be saved in a world to come. The second is the British method, the object of which is to make men of boys, to teach them to think and act for themselves, to be self-sufficing, self-supporting, to know how a gentleman should act in all circumstances, and, should nature have denied him intelligence, to prove himself, in the depths of his stupidity, at least a "gentlemanly" ass. I give my preference, I will own, to the British system, like M. De-