So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class was
over. The two hundred and thirty-four students, after reciting their
prayers, went out as ignorant as when they went in, but breathing more
freely, as if a great weight had been lifted from them. Each youth had
lost another hour of his life and with it a portion of his dignity and
self-respect, and in exchange there was an increase of discontent,
of aversion to study, of resentment in their hearts. After all this
ask for knowledge, dignity, gratitude!

_De nobis, post haec, tristis sententia fertur_!

Just as the two hundred and thirty-four spent their class hours,
so the thousands of students who preceded them have spent theirs,
and, if matters do not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs,
and be brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful enthusiasm
will be converted into hatred and sloth, like the waves that become
polluted along one part of the shore and roll on one after another,
each in succession depositing a larger sediment of filth. But yet He
who from eternity watches the consequences of a deed develop like a
thread through the loom of the centuries, He who weighs the value
of a second and has ordained for His creatures as an elemental
law progress and development, He, if He is just, will demand a
strict accounting from those who must render it, of the millions of
intelligences darkened and blinded, of human dignity trampled upon
in millions of His creatures, and of the incalculable time lost and
effort wasted! And if the teachings of the Gospel are based on truth,
so also will these have to answer--the millions and millions who do
not know how to preserve the light of their intelligences and their
dignity of mind, as the master demanded an accounting from the cowardly