graduate students desire or are expected to study Roman politics, law, and government, they no longer need to know Latin in order to do so.

As to the means of earning a livelihood for a family, no one will now think of maintaining that a knowledge of Latin would be to-day of direct advantage to an American artisan, farmer, operative, or clerk, inasmuch as the means of earning a livelihood in any part of the United States have been wholly changed since Latin became a dead language.

The doctrine that a knowledge of Latin is indispensable to real acquaintance with the great literatures of the world is difficult indeed impossible to maintain before American boys and girls whose native language is that of Shakespeare and Milton, of Franklin and Lincoln, of Gibbon and Macaulay, of Scott, Burns, and Tennyson, and of Emerson and Lowell. English literature is incomparably richer, more various, and ampler in respect to both form and substance than the literature of either Greece or Rome. One of the most interesting and influential forms of English literature, namely, fiction as developed in the historical romance, the novel, and the short story, has no existence in Greek and Roman literature; and the types of both poetry and oratory in English are both more varied and more beautiful than those of Greece and Rome. For at least a hundred years past an important part of the real interest in the Greek and Roman literatures for advanced students has been the interest of studying originators and pioneers in literature — a worthy but not an indispensable study for modern youth. The social and individual problems of life were simpler in the ancient world than in the modern, and they were often solved by giving play to the elemental passions of human nature; so that the study of them affords but imperfect guidance to wise action amid the wider and more com

plex conditions of the modern world. When, as in this great war, modern peoples see great national governments revert to the barbarous customs and passions which were common in the ancient world, they indignantly resolve that this reversion cannot and shall not last.

The languages and literatures of Greece and Rome will always remain attractive fields for students whose tastes and natural capacities are chiefly literary, and especially for men of letters, authors, and professional students of language; but it is certain that they are soon to cease to make a prescribed part of general secondary and higher education. There are too many histories, too many new sciences with applications of great importance, and too many new literatures of high merit which have variety of modern uses, to permit anyone, not bound to the classics by affectionate associations and educational tradition, to believe that Latin can maintain the place it has held for centuries in the youthful training of educated men a place that it acquired when it was the common speech of scholars, and has held for centuries without any such good reason. For this loss of status by Latin genuine classical scholars will naturally console themselves with the reflection that it has never been possible to give an unwilling boy any real acquaintance with the Latin language or any love of Latin literature by compelling him to take three units of Latin at school and a course or two of Latin in college.

Benjamin Franklin, in his observations concerning the intentions of the founders of the Philadelphia Academy, describes the origin of the Latin and Greek schools in Europe as follows:

"That until between three and four hundred years past there were no books in any other language; all the knowledge then contained in books, viz., the theology, the jurisprudence, the physic, the art military, the politics,

the mathematics and mechanics, the natural and moral philosophy, the logic and rhetoric, the chemistry, the pharmacy, the architecture, and every other branch of science, being in those languages, it was, of course, necessary to learn them as the gates through which men must pass to get at that knowledge."

He points out that the books then existing were manuscript, and very dear; and that "so few were the learned readers sixty years after the invention of printing, that it appears by letters still extant between the printers in 1499 that they could not throughout Europe find purchasers for more than three hundred copies of any ancient authors." Franklin further says that when printing began to make books cheap, "Gradually several branches of science began to appear in the common languages; and at this day the whole body of science, consisting not only of translations from all the valuable ancients, but of all the new modern discoveries, is to be met with in those languages, so that learning the ancient for the purpose of acquiring knowledge is become absolutely unnecessary."

In the present state of the surviving prescription of Latin in secondary schools and colleges, there is another objection to it which has much force. If a college requires three units of Latin for admission but no Latin in college, it inflicts on boys in preparatory schools three years of study of Latin which in many instances will lead to nothing during the education which they receive between eighteen and twenty-two or thereabout. At this moment, for most pupils in preparatory schools who under compulsion give one fifth of their school-time to the study of Latin for three years, the classical road leads to a dead-end, when they have once passed their admission examination in Latin. Such dead-ends, no matter what the subject, are always deplorable in what should be a progressive course

in education. Even if the college in which the student seeks the degree of Bachelor of Arts prescribes some further study of Latin, the amount of that prescription is always small; so that the student who abandons Latin when that prescription has been fulfilled has not made a really thorough acquaintance with Latin, and has therefore wasted a large part of the time he has devoted to it. In other words, the present prescription in school and college is against the interest of the greater part of the pupils and students who submit to the prescription. Only those who would have chosen Latin without prescription escape injury from it.

It is a fanciful idea that to understand Greek and Roman civilization and to appreciate the historians, philosophers, orators, military heroes, and patriots of Greece and Rome, one must be able to read Greek and Latin. The substance of Greek and Roman thought and experience can be got at in translations. It is only the delicacies and refinements of style and of poetical expression which are, as a rule, lost in translations. Let the future poets, preachers, artists in words, and men of letters generally give a large part of their time in school and college, if they will, to Greek and Latin; but do not compel the boys and girls. who have no such gift or intention to learn a modicum of Latin.

It is often asserted that the study of Latin gives a boy or girl a mental discipline not otherwise to be obtained, a discipline peculiarly useful to those who have no taste or gift for the study. As a matter of fact, it has doubtless often happened that pupils in secondary schools got through Latin the best training they actually received, because their teachers of Latin were the best teachers in their schools, the best equipped and the most scholarly. The classical schools have been the best schools, and the classical teachers the best teachers. Gradually, within the

past forty years, teachers of modern languages, English, the sciences, and history have been trained in the colleges and universities, who are as scholarly and skillful in their respective fields as any classical teachers. They can teach boys and girls to observe, to think, and to remember in the new subjects quite as well as the teachers of Greek and Latin can in those traditional subjects. At least, they think they can; and many parents and educational administrators think that the new subjects and teachers should have a free opportunity to prove this contention. That is all that the proposal to abolish the requirement of Latin for the degree of Bachelor of Arts really means.

Accompanying the production of well-equipped teachers of the new subjects, has come a better understanding of the way to get intense application, concentrated attention, and the hardest kind of mental work out of children, and indeed out of adults too. People generally recognize nowadays that children, like adults, can do their best and hardest work only in subjects or for objects which keenly interest them. Hence uniform prescriptions for all pupils at school are seen to be inexpedient, except in learning to use the elementary tools of learning; and even there much accommodation to individual peculiarities is desirable. Everybody agrees that power to apply one's self and to work hard mentally is the main object of education; but nearly everybody also has come to know that inspiration or stimulation of interest in any mental work will produce this power to work hard more quickly and more thoroughly than any driving process, no matter what the means of compulsion — rattan, ruler, staying after school, holding up to ridicule, deprivation of play or holidays, or copying pages of French or Latin.

Encouragement with respect to the changes to come ay be drawn from the changes already achieved. Two erations ago the requirements for admission to Har