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136 sections for engineering, brewery, and other technical branches. Moreover the university suffered from the presence of a rival clerical establishment in the same town—conducted, of course, by the Jesuits. The Jesuits, the 'Thundering legion' of the ecclesiastical army, have one weakness from a disciplinary point of view—they never co-operate; 'aut Cæsar aut nullus' is their motto whenever they commence operations in a new locality. And so at Louvain, after, it is said, a long and fruitless effort to secure the monopoly of the university itself, they have erected a splendid and efficient college, in which the lectures are thrown open to outsiders, and from which a brilliant student is occasionally sent to throw down his glove to the university, to defend thirty or forty theses against the united phalanx of veteran professors. The Dominicans have also a large international college in the town, and the American bishops a fourth, in which European volunteers for the American missions are trained. The rivalry which results, although it does occasionally overflow the channel of fraternal charity, helps to sustain the ebbing vitality of the Belgian Church, and turns its attention from the rapid growth of Rationalism and Socialism.

One difference between the Belgian and the English system is that few of the students live in the colleges, scattered at intervals over the town, which form the university. They are usually only lecture halls, and their attendant rooms and museums; the students