Thus I say that as for the State, it derives no benefit from its technical schools; as for the individual pupil of those schools, his earnings are poor, his ambition crushed, and his life a cruel deception.  Most assuredly the powers he has displayed between sixteen and twenty-six years of age would, if he had been cast upon his own resources, have brought him more fame and more wealth than the government in whom he trusted will ever give him.  As a commercial man, a learned man, a military man, this choice intellect would have worked in a vast centre where his precious faculties and his ardent ambition would not be idiotically and prematurely repressed.

Where, then, is progress?  Man and State are both kept backward by this system.  Does not the experience of a whole generation demand a reform in the practical working of these institutions?  The duty of culling from all France during each generation the choice minds destined to become the learned and the scientific of the nation is a sacred office, the priests of which, the arbiters of so many fates, should be trained by special study.  Mathematical knowledge is perhaps less necessary to them than physiological knowledge.  And do you not think that they need a little of that second-sight which is the witchcraft of great men?  As it is, the examiners are former professors, honorable men grown old in harness, who limit their work to selecting the best themes.  They are unable to do what is really demanded of them; and yet their functions are the noblest in the State and demand extraordinary men.

Do not think, dear sir and friend, that I blame only the Ecole itself; no, I blame the system by which it is recruited.  This system is the concours, competition,—­a modern invention, essentially bad; bad not only in science, but wherever it is employed, in arts, in all selections of men, of projects, of things.  If it is a reproach to our great Ecoles that they have not produced men superior to other educational establishments, it is still more shameful that the grand prix of the Institute has not as yet furnished a single great painter, great musician, great architect, great sculptor; just as the suffrage for the last twenty years has not elected out of its tide of mediocrities a single great statesman.  My observation makes me detect, as I think, an error which vitiates in France both education and politics.  It is a cruel error, and it rests on the following principle, which organizers have misconceived:—­

  Nothing, either in experience or in the nature of things, can
  give a certainty that the intellectual qualities of the adult
  youth will be those of the mature man.