have in using my intellectual powers and seeking in the stillness of this commonplace life the solution of some problem useful to humanity.  Ah! monsieur, don’t you know the influence of the provinces,—­the relaxing effect of a life just busy enough to waste time on futile labor, and not enough to use the rich resources our education has given us?  Don’t think me, my dear protector, eaten up by the desire to make a fortune, nor even by an insensate desire for fame.  I am too much of a calculator not to know the nothingness of glory.  Neither do I want to marry; seeing the fate now before me, I think my existence a melancholy gift to offer any woman.  As for money, though I regard it as one of the most powerful means given to social man to act with, it is, after all, but a means.

I place my whole desire and happiness on the hope of being useful to my country.  My greatest pleasure would be to work in some situation suited to my faculties.  If in your region, or in the circle of your acquaintances, you should hear of any enterprise that needed the capacities you know me to possess, think of me; I will wait six months for your answer before taking any step.

What I have written here, dear sir and friend, others think.  I have seen many of my classmates or older graduates caught like me in the toils of some specialty,—­geographical engineers, captain-professors, captains of engineers, who will remain captains all their lives, and now bitterly regret they did not enter active service with the army.  Reflecting on these miserable results, I ask myself the following questions, and I would like your opinion on them, assuring you that they are the fruit of long meditation, clarified in the fires of suffering:—­

What is the real object of the State?  Does it truly seek to obtain fine capacities?  The system now pursued directly defeats that end; it has crated the most thorough mediocrities that any government hostile to superiority could desire.  Does it wish to give a career to its choice minds?  As a matter of fact, it affords them the meanest opportunities; there is not a man who has issued from the Ecoles who does not bitterly regret, when he gets to be fifty or sixty years of age, that he ever fell into the trap set for him by the promises of the State.  Does it seek to obtain men of genius?  What man of genius, what great talent have the schools produced since 1790?  If it had not been for Napoleon would Cachin, the man of genius to whom France owes Cherbourg, have existed?  Imperial despotism brought him forward; the constitutional regime would have smothered him.  How many men from the Ecoles are to be found in the Academy of Sciences?  Possibly two or three.  The man of genius develops always outside of the technical schools.  In the sciences which those schools teach genius obeys only its own laws; it will not develop except under conditions which man cannot control; neither the State nor the science of mankind, anthropology,