provinces a boy can be a boarder for from 450 fr. to 1250 fr., and a day-boy from 50 fr. to 500 fr., with an extra fee of 90 fr. for supervision. Books are provided at 50 fr. a year for day-boys and are free to boarders. In free unsectarian schools the fees are much the same, in ecclesiastical schools slightly lower.

Scholarships. It is calculated that in 1887 there were 5700 scholarship holders in the lycées and 4700 in the collèges, eleven per cent. of the whole school-population. The scholarships, formerly awarded principally because of public service of relations, are now given, except in the case of children of primary and secondary school teachers, on the grounds of necessity and ability, and since 1848 the national, or State, bourses have been supplemented by a liberal supply of departmental and communal bourses, for day-boys as well as boarders. Of the national scholarships only a quarter are held by boys coming direct from the elementary school, and in the country districts there is an admitted deficiency of public help. It is still in the main true that secondary education is built alongside, not on the top of, elementary, and that there is no adequate carrière ouverte aux talents for the brains of the poorest classes. The secondary-school course proper begins when à boy is ten or eleven and the primary-school boy who wins a scholarship later is, therefore, handicapped on arriving at the lycée. The French, on the other hand, show a laudable care in adjusting their help to the needs of the recipient, giving bourses which cover from a quarter to the whole of the expense, and bourses d'entretien, or maintenance grants, to needy day-boys. A boy can offer himself for election any time after passing the seventh class, being tested in work of the same difficulty as that of the form in which he happens to be. If successful he is given a bourse d'essai, which is converted, if he gives satisfaction, into a definite bourse de mérite at the end of a year. It is to be noted that there is also a liberal supply of scholarships in free and ecclesiastical schools.

The Baccalauréat.-All French parents who can afford it are ambitious that their sons should take the bachelor's degree, which opens the door to all branches of the civil service and to the liberal professions. The examination is adapted to the school courses and is taken in two parts, one after a year's work in the first class (rhétorique) and the other after taking philosophy or mathematics. In the paper work (écrit) more stress is laid upon answering a single question thoroughly and tastefully than upon showing varied and extensive knowledge, this last being tested rather by the oral, to which candidates who have passed on the

written work are admitted. The examiners are now chosen in about equal numbers from university and secondary professors, and a boy can produce his livret scolaire to show his school record. Rather less than half the candidates pass in the July examination: the rest generally try again in the following November. Able and needy aspirants to teaching, on signing a ten years' engagement, are given a bourse de licence to read for a higher degree, and there are also bourses de séjour à l'étranger for modern-language students and professors. There is also an attempt made to counteract the excessive tendency towards state or professional careers by awarding scholarships to the great commercial and technical schools. The need for this is shown by the recorded ambitions of 974 boursiers de lycée in 1894-95-96, of whom 204 meant to be professors, 66 aspired to the magistrature or the bar, 215 to government administration, 259 to medicine or pharmacy, 123 to the army, and only 107 to business or manufacturing.

Conclusion. To deal first with the defects, the first and greatest in French secondary education is obviously its neglect of the allround interests of the boy) When the overcrowded lycées, which tend to become mere brain factories, are converted into museums and their boys are removed into smaller schools, preferably in the suburbs, with room for playing-fields, then and then only will the delightful French youngster come into his own. Meanwhile, if it can find them, and they certainly exist, the State might appoint "apostles instead of officials" as its headmasters, and by giving them greater independence encourage them to stay in one school longer than the present period of one to three years. Again, the advice of the Ribot Commission might be followed and boarders distributed among recognised families, preferably among the masters, if French tradition, as is probable, proves too strong for the thorough humanisation of the internat, long the most crying evil of French education. (But only when the masters, and especially the headmaster, take a personal as well as a professional interest in the welfare of their boys shall we find the éducation worthy of the admirable enseignement. The next defect, closely related to the first, is the appalling monotony of type displayed by the lycées and collèges.) What France sorely needs is diversity and variety of type and experiment, and instead of aiming at a state monopoly she should, after taking suitable guarantees, encourage, rather than crush, free schools, even if they are conducted by the clergy. The ends of education can be adequately served only when it is treated as a national concern beyond the

U

reach of political and religious bickerings. The whole of France gained in inspiration when Lacordaire was headmaster of the clerical school at Sorèze and his favourite pupil, Père Didon, at Arcueil, for apostles are to be found among priests as well as laymen. France is surely great enough to embrace and recognise every kind of past tradition and to help all schools that are working in a common cause. Generous emulation is needed, not jealousy and mutual bitterness.

Turning to the good points of the French lycée, they are too many to enumerate. The teaching is admirable and by the curricula the boy fulfils Matthew Arnold's dictum-he gets "to know himself and the world." Science pervades the teaching of languages and a literary spirit the teaching of the sciences. No country teaches its own mother-tongue so inspiringly and thoroughly. Intellectually the middle-classes in France are brought up on the first plane, and inside the school, although as we have seen its doors are not as yet flung open widely enough to the able poor, there is a splendid absence of class distinction. French education is cheap to buy, but the teaching is always an article of first quality guaranteed by the State. The notable recent reaction, on the part of a portion of the wealthier classes, in favour of a type of boarding-school education on English lines, which was aroused by M. Demolin's book A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons, and has already resulted in the foundation of five schools, of which the most famous are the École des Roches, the École de l'Ile de France, and the Collège de Normandie, must not blind us to the necessity of France reforming her system on national lines. As long as the baccalauréat is the entrance to all professions and to the civil service, most parents will send their boys to schools where success in this examination can be best assured, and too many will find the higher fees of these new schools beyond their means. Useful as all such experiments are, the solution will only come when the State herself has been converted to the humanising of her own establishments and undertaken to provide for the whole training of the boy, whether day-boy or boarder, as excellently as she has long provided for the intellectual equipment of the bourgeoisie. The Ministry of Education has recently shown itself so accessible to new ideas and so paternally interested, as it professes, in the highest good of its young charges that those who are the most fully alive to the defects of to-day are inclined to look forward with confidence to the developments pending in the future.

III. UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

As we have seen, there are now, and have been since 1896, fifteen universities in France, as well as that peculiarly national institution the "University of France," which is really the State in its function as supervisor of all branches of education. It would indeed be surprising if we did not find universities, in the ordinary sense of the term, in a country which gave birth to them. At the time of the Revolution there were indeed twenty-one, but in a moribund condition, dying slowly of medieval formalism. With the Revolution they disappeared and in their place arose, with the exception of the liberal Institute of France, special schools of a narrowly utilitarian and professional character, such as the Polytechnic, the Normal School, and the Schools of Medicine and Law. With Napoleon came the University, in the State sense, centralising all education under one administration and retaining the practical character of the higher studies. The Schools of Law and Medicine were rechristened Faculties and by their side sprang up Faculties of Letters and Science, the principal duty of which was not so much teaching or learning as the granting of degrees which might serve as a guarantee for admission to certain professions and to State employment. So things continued until 1868, France producing many men of high distinction in literature and science, but in spite of, rather than because of, the Faculties themselves, which were formal in their humane studies and very badly equipped for scientific research. Most of the teaching was superficial and, apart from celebrated public lectures, given to empty benches. In 1868, the École des Hautes Études was founded by Victor Duruy, the first fruits of the democratic and scientific enthusiasm which produced the Revolution of 1848 and survived and grew throughout the Second Empire. The faith of the people was centred on science, pure and applied, and the same spirit reacted on every sphere of thought, producing naturalism in art, positivism in philosophy, and transforming the attitude of the savant towards philology and criticism. More and more the need was felt of a national system of universities where this spirit should reign and grow. Reinforced by the lessons of 1870, and consistently fostered by the Third Republic, this movement has to-day reasonably realised the ambitions of its early champions. Inspired by the freedom and unfettered research of the German universities, France has now succeeded in a double task, the

granting of degrees which shall remain State, not academic, degrees and shall serve as a standardised public guarantee of efficiency, and the fostering of scientific method in every branch of study. This success has been chiefly due to the energy with which the great French towns have seconded the government in transforming and equipping their languid Faculties. They have provided nearly half the cost of the buildings, while the generosity of the State may be measured by the fact that whereas in 1870 the State voted for Superior Education only 4,245,521 fr., in 1913 the university portion of the yearly budget amounted to 25,905,398 fr. In 1874 there were six chairs in the Arts Faculty at Bordeaux: there are now twenty. In 1877 there were six students at the Sorbonne in Paris: in 1911-12 there matriculated in the Faculty of Letters alone 3221 students, of whom 1225 were foreigners. In the Faculties of Science the number has risen from 194 in 1878 to 6639 in 1913. Since 1898 the universities have been given an independent existence: they collect for their own use their own fees, while the State pays for nearly all the teaching, and most of the equipment and scholarships. The private budget of each university is spent principally on libraries, collections, laboratories, and publications.

Organisation. There are, we have seen, seventeen academies, fifteen of which are in university towns. The rector of the university is head of the academy and represents the Minister. His task is to superintend the efficiency of the three grades of national education. Confining ourselves here to his control of superior instruction, we may say that the rector is at once the representative of the State University of France and of his own particular university. In the management of the affairs of the latter he is helped by a university council, which administers university property and settles internal difficulties. It is composed of the deans of all the Faculties ex officio and two other representatives are elected by each Faculty as well. Besides this supreme council, every Faculty has its own council and assembly, the former made up of full professors and professeurs adjoints only, the latter embracing also the chargés de cours and lecturers, or maîtres de conférences, as they are called. The dean is appointed for three years by the Minister from a double list of two candidates presented by the university council and by the Faculty assembly.

Stipends.-The full professors, professeurs titulaires, enjoy independence and practical security of tenure. Their salary varies between 12,000 and 15,000 fr. in Paris and 6000 and 12,000 in the