EVENING SPIDERS
THE INTERNSHIP

The General Association of Students informs those interested that many of its members would willingly accept some employment likely to provide them with a useful supplement to their resources. This note, reproduced by the press, will provide some colleagues with the opportunity to deplore once again the misery of the times when we see young people, devoted to pure intellectual speculation, forced to earn their bread in crude work.

In my opinion, this obligation is not so regrettable. First, we would be wrong to see it as something new, since at all times, students with little money have had to manage to make up for the insufficiency of the family pension and it is not always those who, subsequently, have reached the lowest level. The only disadvantage of such a situation is that it puts the poor student in a state of temporary inferiority vis-à-vis his rich comrade. It would therefore be desirable that the exception should become the rule and that a sort of internship in what used to be called "mechanical professions" should be imposed on the youth of schools. First, there would be nothing like it to test the solidity of certain vocations, then, never could a better opportunity be offered to schoolchildren to acquire this experience of life without which the man best imbued with bookish knowledge is nothing other than a dangerous ignoramus. It is not bad for a future professor, a future magistrate, a future minister to know otherwise than by hearsay, the existence of the vague humanities which do not exercise a liberal career.

Bernard GERVAISE.