from their unfair tactics, their neglect of the evidence, their preposterous logic, and to urge the educated public to examine the matter for themselves. He must wearily repeat his old list of "must nots" and "don'ts." You must not shift the issue by talking about democracy and the masses, and industrial education, and Booker Washington at Tuskegee, and Madame Montessori. That is a mere subterfuge. We are speaking of nonvocational highschool and collegiate education. You must not urge that "they don't get Latin," that Latin is badly taught and imperfectly remembered, unless you can show that other subjects are always effectively taught and not forgotten. And also, unless you confess that the unrest and the unsettlement which you yourselves have introduced into American education is a chief cause of the lack of conviction with which most definite or difficult subjects are taught and studied to-day.

You must not talk as most of you do about eight, ten, or twelve years of Latin study without result, for that is an unscrupulous exaggeration. You must not misquote and apply to totally different conditions the satire of English writers aimed at schools in which practically nothing was taught except the writing of Latin verse.

You must not argue that, because Latin is comparatively less important to us than it was to the Renaissance, it is therefore of little or no significance. For, if you have ever studied elementary logic, you know the name for that kind of reasoning. You must not regard a demagogic sneer at culture as an argument, for culture is a harmless necessary word that serves as well as another to designate if not to describe a persistent though not easily definable ideal the thing, let us say, that a Latinless generation of graduates will presumably lack.

You must not say, as President Eliot again repeats, that modern literature is not inferior to the classics. That is a

But our

consolation for those who cannot have both. contention is precisely that the boy who goes to college or even through the high school will understand modern literature better for knowing even a little Latin. There is no real incompatibility between knowing Latin and acquaintance with modern literature. The professors of classics would cheerfully stand a competitive examination on modern literature with the professional modernists at any time.

You must not argue that Latin is useless, without discriminating the various meanings of utility, the higher and lower utility, the immediate and remote utility, direct and indirect and unless you are prepared also to abolish for high school and college students all studies that are useless in the precise sense in which the term applies to Latin. You must not tell the public that the science of psychology has disproved mental discipline in general, or the specific value of the discipline of analytic language study in particular. For if you are a competent psychologist, you know that it is false. And to sum up and conclude these negative commandments, you ought not to divert the minds of your pupils, your readers, your audiences, from the real issue, by rhetorical appeals either to prejudice or to pseudo-science.

By the appeal to prejudice I mean such things as the perpetual insinuation that classical studies are aristocratic, undemocratic, supercilious, arrogant, narrowly exclusive, and unappreciative of modern excellence. Democracy has nothing to do with the matter; and it is a shameless fallacy to introduce the word into the discussion at all. There is no connection between the equality of men before the law and the attempt to equalize the educational value of all subjects for all purposes. Any kind of knowledge may puff up some kinds of men, and to triumph over your neighbor because he happens not to know the things you

know best, is not an amiable trait of human nature. The perpetual defensive against unfair attack may lend a touch of acerbity to the speech of some advocates of the classics. But classical teachers of to-day, as a whole, are, as they have to be, a rather meek and meeching set.

The successful practical man hires his chemists and physicists as he may hire a classical tutor for his son or for his university; and he is not in the least prejudiced against the study of chemistry and physics by the suspicion that the associate professor of chemistry, who has a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars a year, secretly regards him as an ignoramus.

THE ASSAULT ON HUMANISM. II

PAUL SHOREY

I

SOME humanistic readers may be disappointed by the space given to these dialectics of controversy. But it is no longer worth while to play this game according to the conventional rules. What is expected in a plea for classical studies is gentle deprecation of the utilitarian and commercial spirit of the age, and wistful emotional appeals to an idealism that soars beyond all practical reference to actual educational conditions and all narrow scrutiny of the adversary's logic. There is thus no meeting of minds. The rhetoric of idealism makes no impression on advocates who have prejudged the case which they refuse to study. And the general reader, even if pleasantly and irresponsibly titillated for the moment, turns away in the mood of Tennyson's Northern Farmer after the sermon :

"An' I thowt a said whot a owt to a said, an' I coom'd awaäy."

I do not know whether Mr. Leacock intended seriously his skit on "Homer and Humbug," and the stone which he wished to hurl into the academic garden wrapped in the rune, "Homer and the classics are just primitive literature." But to the Spencers and the Le Bons who take it seriously, we could only reply:

Deafer... blinder unto holy things,
Hope not to make thyself by idle vows,
Being too blind to have desire to see.

If we are to count opinions, Professor Leacock's opinion that the art of Homer belongs "in the same class as primitive music and . . . primitive medicine" will count as one. And so will the opinion of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch that "Homer stands first, if not unmatched, among poets in the technical triumph over the capital disability of annihilating flat passages." And Professor Leacock's emotion of conviction is more than matched by that of this successful writer of twentieth-century novels and Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, who declares that if the university should limit him to three texts on which to preach English literature, he would choose the Bible, Shakespeare, and Homer and Homer first. There is ample choice in opinions.

The fact that, after twenty years or so of high-school teaching, a gentleman who has presented no public evidence of specialized and scientific competency beyond administrative ability and the mastery of a ready journalistic pen, experiences a distaste for Milton and Burke and opines that Latin and algebra are not significant studies, is in itself of no more significance than the fact that an elderly teacher of Greek is of the contrary opinion. What makes it a timely topic of discussion is the consideration that the reformer is widely believed to speak as an expert or for experts in a supposed science of education.

...

"Abraham Flexner is another new name that appeals to us," writes the San Francisco Chronicle of August 19, 1916. "He says 'mental discipline is not a genuine or valid purpose - it's a make-believe."" Our plain speech is a part of the price that Mr. Flexner must pay for this continental fame.

There can be no question of personality so long as the appeal is solely to the unmisrepresented printed word. And no skepticism that we may express about the validity of his science can offend his sense of propriety more than