EDITOR'S TABLE. 



705 



forced itself upon the thought of the 

 present age with the following result : 

 " I made for myself what might per- 

 haps be called a specialty in connection 

 with the development of the railroad 

 system. I do not hesitate to say that 

 I have been incapacitated from prop- 

 erly developing my specialty by the 

 sins of omission and commission inci- 

 dent to my college training. The mis- 

 chief is done, and, so far as I am con- 

 cerned, is irreparable. I am only one 

 more sacrifice to the fetich. But I do 

 not propose to be a silent sacrifice. I 

 am here to-day to put the responsibility 

 for my failure so far as I have failed 

 at the door of my preparatory and col- 

 lege education." 



Mr. Adams charges that this failure 

 is very far from being a thing of imagi- 

 nation or sentiment ; but, on the con- 

 trary, it has been not only matter-of- 

 fact and real, but to the last degree 

 humiliating. He convicts his college 

 of having refused to furnish him with 

 that modern knowledge which is indis- 

 pensable to effective work in mod- 

 ern life ; of withholding from him the 

 knowledge of those living languages 

 which open communication with the 

 world of contemporary thought ; of 

 wasting his youthful years upon dead 

 languages which were never learned ; 

 of substituting a lax superficiality for 

 thoroughness of attainment; of forcing 

 its vicious system back upon the pre- 

 paratory schools ; and of adhering with 

 superstitious tenacity to an educational 

 policy fitted only to turn out incompe- 

 tent smatterers, not half taught in sub- 

 jects of very small importance. We 

 quote some pointed passages of his in- 

 dictment : 



Now as respects' the college preparation 

 we received to fit us to take part in this 

 world' s debate. As one goes on in life, espe- 

 cially in modem lite, a few conclusions are 

 hammered into us by the hard logic of facts. 

 Among those conclusions I think I may, with- 

 out much fear of contradiction, enumerate 

 such practical, common-sense, and common- 

 place precepts as that superficiality is danger- 



vol. xxiii. 45 



ous, as well as contemptible, in that it is apt 

 to invite defeat ; or, again, that what is worth 

 doing at all is worth doing well ; or, third, 

 that when one is given work to do, it is well 

 to prepare one's self for that specific work, 

 and not to occupy one's time in acquiring in- 

 formation, no matter how innocent or elegant, 

 or generally useful, which has no probable 

 bearing on that work ; or, finally and this 

 I regard as the greatest of all practical pre- 

 cepts that every man should in life master 

 some one thing, be it great or be it small, so 

 that thereon he may be the highest living au- 

 thority ; that one thing he should know thor- 

 oughly. 



How did Harvard College prepare me, 

 and my ninety-two classmates of the year 

 1S56, for our work in a life in which we have 

 had these homely precepts brought close to 

 us 1 In answering the question it is not alto- 

 gether easy to preserve one's gravity. The 

 college fitted us for this active, bustling, hard- 

 hitting, many-tongued world, caring nothing 

 for authority and little for the past, but full 

 of its living thought and living issues, in deal- 

 ing with which there was no man who did 

 not stand in pressing and constant need of 

 every possible preparation as respects knowl- 

 edge and exactitude and thoroughness the 

 poor old college prepared us to play our parts, 

 in this world by compelling us, directly and 

 indirectly, to devote the best part of our 

 school lives to acquiring a confessedly super- 

 ficial knowledge of two dead languages. 



In regard to the theory of what we call a 1 

 liberal education, there is, as I understand 

 it, not much room for difference of opinion. 

 There are certain fundamental requirements 

 without a thorough mastery of which no one 

 can pursue a specialty to advantage. Upon 

 these common fundamentals are grafted the 

 specialties the students' electives, as we call 

 them. The man is simply mad who in these 

 days takes all knowdedge for his province. 

 He who professes to do so can only mean that 

 he proposes, in so far as in him lies, to reduce 

 superficiality to a science. 



Such is the theory. Now, what is the prac- 

 tice ? Thirty years ago, as for three centu- 

 ries before, Greek and Latin were the funda- 

 mentals. The grammatical study of two dead 

 languages was the basis of all liberal educa- 

 tion. It is still its basis. But, following the 

 theory out, I think all will admit that, as re- 

 spects the fundamentals, the college training 

 should be compulsory and severe. It should 

 extend through the whole course. No one 

 ought to become a Bachelor of Arts until, 

 upon these fundamentals, he had passed an 

 examination, the scope and thoroughness of 



