a competitive examination an inalienable right to his place in them, is an infallible source of weakness.  For my own part I have never been able to understand how the master of a normal school, for instance, manages, inasmuch as he is unable to say, without further explanation, to the pupils who are unsuited for their vocation:  “You have not the bent of intelligence for our calling, but I have no doubt that you are a very good lad, and that you will get on better elsewhere.  Good-bye.”  Even the most trifling punishment implies a servile principle of obedience from fear.  So far as I am myself concerned, I do not think that at any period of my life I have been obedient.  I have, I know, been docile and submissive, but it has been to a spiritual principle, not to a material force wielding the dread of punishment.  My mother never ordered me to do a thing.  The relations between my ecclesiastical teachers and myself were entirely free and spontaneous.  Whoever has had experience of this rationabile obsequium cannot put up with any other.  An order is a humiliation whosoever has to obey is a capitis minor sullied on the very threshold of the higher life.  Ecclesiastical obedience has nothing lowering about it; for it is voluntary, and those who do not get on together can separate.  In one of my Utopian dreams of an aristocratic society, I have provided that there should only be one penalty, death; or rather, that all serious offences should be visited by a reprimand from the recognised authorities which no man of honour would survive.  I should never have done to be a soldier, for I should either have deserted or committed suicide.  I am afraid that the new military institutions which do not leave a place for any exceptions or equivalents will have a very lowering moral effect.  To compel every one to obey is fatal to genius and talent.  The man who has passed years in the carriage of arms after the German fashion is dead to all delicate work whether of the hand or brain.  Thus it is that Germany would be devoid of all talent since she has been engrossed in military pursuits, but for the Jews, to whom she is so ungrateful.

The generation which was from fifteen to twenty years of age, at the brilliant but fleeting epoch of which I am speaking, is now between fifty-five and sixty.  It will be asked whether this generation has realised the unbounded hopes which the ardent spirit of our great preceptor had conceived.  The answer must unquestionably be in the negative, for if these hopes had been fulfilled the face of the world would have been completely changed.  M. Dupanloup was too little in love with his age, and too uncompromising to its spirit, to mould men in accordance with the temper of the time.  When I recall one of these spiritual readings during which the master poured out the treasures of his intelligence, the class-room with its serried benches upon which clustered two hundred lads hushed in attentive respect, and when