Observe that this apprenticeship in common, sitting on benches according to certain regulations and under a master, lasts six, ten, fifteen years and often twenty; that girls are not exempt from it; that not one boy out of a hundred is educated to the end at home by a private teacher; that, in secondary and even in superior instruction, the school wheel turns uniformly and without stopping ten hours a day if the scholar boards outside, and twenty-four hours a day if he boards within; that at this age the human clay is soft, that it has not yet received its shape, that no acquired and resistant form yet protects it from the potter's hand, against the weight of the turning-wheel, against the friction of other morsels of clay kneaded alongside of it, against the three pressures, constant and prolonged, which compose public education.
Evidently, there is here an enormous force, especially if the three pressures, instead of opposing each other, as often happens, combine and converge towards the production of a certain finished type of man; if, from infancy to youth and from youth to adult age, the successive stages of preparation are superposed in such a way as to stamp the adopted type deeper and with more exactness; if all the influences and operations that impress it, near or far, great or small, internal or external, form together a coherent, defined, applicable and applied system.

Let the State undertake its fabrication and application, let it monopolize public education, let it become its regulator, director and contractor, let it set up and work its machine throughout the length and breadth of the land, let it, through moral authority and legal constraint, force the new generation to enter therein--it will find twenty years later in these minors who have become major, the kind and number of ideas it aimed to provide, the extent, limit and form of mind it approves of, and the moral and social prejudice that suits its purposes.
II.

Napoleon's Educational Instruments.
Napoleon's aim .-- University monopoly .-- Revival and multitude of private schools .-- Napoleon regards them unfavorably .-- His motives .-- Private enterprises compete with public enterprise .-- Measures against them .-- Previous authorization necessary and optional suppression of them .-- Taxes on free education in favor of the university .-- Decree of November, 1811 .-- Limitation of secondary teaching in private schools.
-- How the university takes away their pupils .-- Day-schools as prescribed .-- Number of boarders limited .-- Measures for the restriction or assimilation of ecclesiastical schools.
-- Recruits forcibly obtained in prominent and ill-disposed families .-- Napoleon the sole educator in his empire.
Such is the aim of Napoleon:[6101] "In the establishment of an educational corps," he says to himself,[6102] "my principal aim is to secure the means for directing political and moral opinions." Still more precisely, he counts on the new institution to set up and keep open for inspection a universal and complete police registry.

"This registry must be organized in such a way as to keep notes on each child after age of nine years."[6103] Having seized adults he wants to seize children also, watch and shape future Frenchmen in advance; brought up by him, in his hands or in sight, they become ready-made a assistants, docile subjects and more docile than their parents.[6104] Amongst the latter, there are still to many unsubmissive and refractory spirits, too many royalists and too many republicans; domestic traditions from family to family contradict each other or vary, and children grow up in their homes only to clash with each other in society afterwards.

Let us anticipate this conflict; let us prepare them for concord; all brought up in the same fashion, they will some day or other find themselves unanimous,[6105] not only apparently, as nowadays through fear or force, but in fact and fundamentally, through inveterate habit and by previous adaptation of imagination and affection.