desservans "more than 35,000 belong to the laboring class of workmen
and peasants,"[62] not the first class of peasants, but the second
class, the poorer families earning their daily bread and often with a
good many children. Under the pressure of the ambient atmosphere and
of the modern régime, the others keep back their sons, retaining them
for the world and denying them to the Church; ambition, even low down
on the scale, has developed itself and changed its object. No longer
do they aspire for their sons to become a curé but a school master, a
railroad employee, or a commercial clerk.[63] It was necessary to go
descend further, a lower stratum has to be attained, in order to
extract from it the priests that are lacking.

Undoubtedly, at this depth, the extraction was more expensive; the
family cannot afford to pay for the child's ecclesiastic cal
education; the State, moreover, after 1830, no longer gives anything
to the lower seminary, nor to the large one after 1885.[64] The
expenses of these schools must be borne by the faithful in the shape
of donations and legacies; to this end, the bishop orders collections
in the churches in Lent and encourages his diocesans to found
scholarships. The outlay for the support and education, nearly gratis,
of a future priest between the ages of twelve and twenty-four is very
great; in the lower seminary alone it costs from forty to fifty
thousand francs over and above the net receipts;[65] facing such an
annual deficit, the bishop, who is responsible for the undertaking, is
greatly concerned and sometimes extremely anxious. To make amends, and
as compensation, the extraction is surer; the long process by which a
child is withdrawn and instructed for the priesthood goes on and is
finished with less uncertainty. Neither the light nor the murmur of
the century finds its way to these low depths; nobody
ever reads the newspaper, even the penny paper; vocations can here