outfits by noon. Maybe we can find a farmhouse along the way."

"Hell," said Hawthorne sceptically, "we won't see our outfit afore night, an' you know it. Besides, it's nearly all evacuated district between here an' the front." "Come on, Hawthorne. The streets'll be full of soldiers in a minute an' we'll git run in," Goodwin pleaded.

Hawthorne resigned himself. "An' me with a gimpy laig," he said.

They walked under the heavy gateway to the road, a white ridge bending along green slopes past the walled town and through a wood where the ground levelled. There, the road was straight, with an appearance of coolness beneath the overhanging boughs. They walked without speaking. Hawthorne, because of the not-quite-healed wound in his leg, employed a kind of ploughing gait, and from time to time Goodwin would regard him stealthily, jealously, then look straight ahead again to the point where the road narrowed into nothingness. He was satisfied with himself, pleased with his success in bringing Hawthorne back to his outfit safely. If it hadn't been for him, Hawthorne would certainly have been arrested. And with his record! He would have been thrown in jail for the rest of his life. But now Hawthorne could go back to his outfit and live down his attack on the mess sergeant. At any rate, Hawthorne had learned his lesson.

In rear of them the revolutions of a motor sounded, and as they looked back they saw an ambulance speeding toward. them. The brakes tightened, the rubber seared, skidding on the gravel, and an obliging driver stopped.

At the back of the car they sat facing each other on the long, leather-covered seats. Signs of the front grew more numerous each moment. The evacuation hospital, the camouflaged supply dump, the long-range guns hidden in a cellar and covered with leaves, the mended road, the concrete machine-gun emplacementthey passed all of them.

At a crossroad the ambulance stopped. To the left was a shell-raked farmhouse, headquarters of the brigade to which Hawthorne belonged. To the right, far beyond the blue-black woods, lay Goodwin's troops. Goodwin held out his hand. "Well, Hawthorne, what'll you do when you git back to your outfit?"

"Hell," said Hawthorne, tightening his webbed belt and grinning, "I'll report for duty an' then carve my name all over the face of that Lentz."

"Who?" asked Goodwin.
"Lentz, the mess sergeant."

"Oh," said Goodwin dully, far down in his throat. "Well, so long, Hawthorne." As he turned to the right he was sickeningly aware of the distance he had yet to go and the fact that he was very hungry.

T

HE fifteen provincial universities of France are not distributed over the map according to any statistical plan either of territory or population, but they may be divided geographically into five groups: Lille, Nancy, Strasbourg, the northern group; Dijon, Besançon, Lyons, Grenoble, the eastern group; Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Aix-Marseilles, the southern group; Caen and Rennes, the western group; Poitiers and Clermont-Ferrand, the central group.* They differ much in size, in situation, in particular characteristics, but they are

*No mention has been made in this article of the Uniwas unable to visit. I hear from Americans who have studied there that it offers good opportunities of instruction

versity of Algiers, a French state university, which the writer

by an excellent faculty. It has about 1500 students.

alike in a certain impression they make upon one who, like the writer, visits them all within a few months. It is the inspiring experience of meeting in their professors a body of men devoted to the pursuit of truth and the great task of handing on the deposit of the world's knowledge to the next generation, who live with dignity under narrow material conditions, finding their chief pleasures in the things of the mind and the consciousness of a service rendered to their country.

The French universities are not, like the universities of the United States, separate and independent institutions. On the contrary, while each retains a certain individual liberty of management and action, they form integral parts of

the French system of national education -they are, so to speak, important wheels in that great machine. They all have the same chief, the Minister of Education and Fine Arts, and are under the direction and inspection of the Director of Higher Education. At regular intervals their rectors assemble at Paris to take counsel together, and with the central authorities, upon their common task. They have a common organ of communication with educational institutions outside of France in "The National Office of French Universities and Schools". a sort of Foreign Office for the French educational system, which has representatives in New York and London.

Their common task can most easily be understood by noticing the fact that the Rector of Poitiers, for example, is sometimes spoken of as Rector of the Academy of Poitiers and sometimes as Rector of the University of Poitiers. This means, that he has a double duty. He is the central executive of the university, conducting its affairs with the aid of the deans of the various faculties, and he is also the executive head of the entire, school system-from primary school to normal school-in the district included by the Academy of Poitiers.

For all the state institutions of learning in that district the Rector of the university is a sort of educational archbishop, and the size of the province, which is the academy, has no necessary relation to the size of the university. Thus the University of Rennes in 1921 was the fifth in France in the number of its students; it was the second in France for the number of students of the schools forming part of the Academy of Rennes examined for the baccalaureate or graduation certificate from the secondary schools. This baccalaureate examination is conducted by a mixed commission of the Faculties of Letters and of Science and teachers in the lycées (somewhat like our high schools but receiving tuition fees). The student who has passed it in any academy has the key to the entrance gates of any university.

Once inside the university he is free to choose his faculty and, within that faculty, his studies, except that, if he wants either a special certificate (a sort of partial

course differing in different universities) or the degree of doctor (necessary to the higher teaching posts and the learned professions), he must be ready to pass examinations, less frequent than ours, but more comprehensive and difficult. These examinations normally consist of two: the licence, sometimes divided into several examinations but more often comprised in one, and the doctorate. In addition there are competitive examinations, extremely severe, called aggregations, which are the entrance gates to professorships either in the lycées or the universities. In the faculty of medicine there are a number of examinations leading up to the doctorate.

This comparative liberty to do as he pleases without having his work controlled and checked at frequent intervals, in each of his various courses, does not lead to that neglect of regular work which might be feared from its immediate application to our American universities. A régime of liberty which treats the university student as a man capable of being left to his own responsibility to prepare himself by continued and regular daily effort for a distant and difficult test of his knowledge and attainments, is the ideal toward which our American universities ought to work. Its ruthless application as a theory without regard to the hard facts of the psychology of the youth which now enters our American universities, would result in much disillusionment to students and to their parents. The word "ruthless" is carefully chosen, for it is certainly a cruelty to force upon youths a responsibility which demands a larger ability for unaided selfcontrol and a maturer judgment of the comparative value of things than they possess or are willing to use.

The average French student is more serious in his attitude toward what he comes to college to get and works very much harder than the average American student. Of the reasons for this, three may be noted.

First, what is known as college life, which, as it exists in many of our colleges and universities, is a very beautiful thing, exists in so much feebler a degree in French universities that it draws nobody to them for that alone. Whereas, the

curse of our American institutions of learning is the number of lads entering them who have no desire in regard to

Lille. The Students Club.

learning except to avoid doing as much labor as possible in order to devote as much time as possible to what they believe to be "college life." Their inexperience hides from them that college life draws all its most subtle charms from the fact that it is the life of students; otherwise it degenerates and becomes as banal as the life of any other gang or set of people anywhere. The necessity of converting these foolish lads, or of eliminating the incorrigibles, is the chief reason why the first two years of most of our colleges and universities do not count for more than they do toward the task of training good citizens with cultivated minds. Second, the French student who qualifies for a university by passing his baccalaureate has been, during his school course, a very hard worker. Most Frenchmen with whom I have talked believe that the average French boy or girl in the secondary school has to work too long hours for his physical, and even for his mental, health. I accept their opinion, and I also venture to express my own suspicion that the average American boy or girl in our schools is not made to work nearly hard enough.

However that may be, the average French young man or woman comes through the gateway of the baccalaureate knowing

what mental work is and used to doing it without too much babying.

Third, in a certain very marked respect the composition of the student bodies in French universities differs from that in American universities. French universities have always been a combination of the last two years of our American universities and our professional schools. My university friends tell me that since the war they have become more professional. The reason is not far to seek: France has buried 1,300,000 men—and the larger part of these dead are from the very flower of her youth. She has more than half a million more of crippled half-time workers. Some of the older men, as I have been told by more than one of them, are staying in harness beyond the time they had fixed for retirement to well-earned leisure, but that does not relieve much the enormous strain upon the successive crops of young men to fill up the empty ranks and rapidly take the places of their older brothers in conducting the life of France. Most French university students are preparing for examinations, without which they cannot earn their living, or studying subjects directly related to earning their living.

Aix.

franc buys less than a third of what it did before the war, and the 6,000 francs or more which are reckoned as the average cost of a year at the university, are a heavy drag on the budget of the father of a family who earns from 12,000 to 30,000 francs a year.

In this point of the composition of their student body the American universities differ for the moment from their French sisters. For a considerable number of our students the university examinations are in no sense gateways to their professions. They intend to enter business and they could, if they wished, begin earning money in business at eighteen instead

direct and visible relation to their future bread and butter.

The object is only to point out this difference and its results, and not at all to express any regret for it. Many French professors have, on the contrary, expressed to me their great regret over the comparative absence of this element in the present French student body. The presence of these students, who, as they sometimes say themselves, "don't need. to go through college," gives to the American universities a great advantage over their French sisters in a certain chance to render service to the future of the Republic! An advantage due not at