122 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



quiring the niceties of Greek and Latin 

 scholarship! We resent the nickname 

 of the ' Chinese of Europe,' yet our 

 education offers the closest possible 

 analogue to that which reigns in the 

 Celestial Empire, and for centuries we 

 have continued, and are continuing, a 

 system to which (so far as I know) no 

 other civilized nation attaches any im- 

 portance, yet which leaves us to bor- 

 row our scholarship second-hand from 

 them; which is now necessary for 

 the very highest classical honors at 

 the University of Cambridge alone ; in 

 which only one has a partial glimmer- 

 ing of success, for hundreds and hun- 

 dreds who inevitably fail ; and in which 

 the few exceptional successes are so 

 flagrantly useless that they can only be 

 regarded at the best as a somewhat 

 trivial and fantastic accomplishment 

 an accomplishment so singularly bar- 

 ren of all results that it has scarcely 

 produced a dozen original poems on 

 which the world sets the most trifling 

 value ; while we waste years in thus 

 perniciously fostering idle verbal imita- 

 tions, and in neglecting the rich fruit of 

 ancient learning for its bitter, useless, 

 and unwholesome husk while we thus 

 dwarf many a vigorous intellect, and 

 disgust many a manly mind while a 

 great university, neglecting in large 

 measure the literature and the philoso- 

 phy of two leading nations, contents it- 

 self with being, in the words of one of 

 its greatest sons, 'a bestower of re- 

 wards for school-boy merit ' while 

 thousands of despairing boys thus waste 

 their precious hours in * contracting 

 their own views and deadening their 

 own sensibilities ' by a failure in the 

 acquisition of the useless while we 

 apply this inconceivably irrational pro- 

 cess to Greek and Latin, and to no other 

 language ever yet taught under the sun 

 while we thus accumulate instruction 

 without education, and feel no shame 

 or compunction if at the end of many 

 years we thrust our youth, in all their 

 unwarned ignorance, through the open 



gate of life while, I say, such a system 

 as this continues and flourishes, which 

 most practical men have long scorned 

 with an immeasurable contempt, do not 

 let us consider that we have advanced 

 a single step in reforming education, to 

 reform which, in the words of Leib- 

 nitz, is to reform society and to reform 

 mankind." 



This is sufficiently explicit and em- 

 phatic as to the worth of current clas- 

 sical study, but the ever-ready objec- 

 tion is, that all this condemnation is 

 only true of the bad methods by which 

 the dead languages are taught, and 

 that, if they were taught as they should 

 be and can be, there would be no basis 

 for the charge of failure. But Mr. Ad- 

 ams's arraignment was of the existing 

 practice, and he did not deny that 

 there may possibly be a better practice 

 in which classical studies shall be suc- 

 cessful. President Porter does not 

 hesitate to fall back upon the bad 

 methods of teaching as giving some ex- 

 cuse for the charge of failure. "We 

 suspect, however, that a good deal 

 more is made of this bad-method pre- 

 text than it will bear, and that the 

 study of dead languages as a leading 

 element of higher education in this age 

 must remain a failure, whatever the 

 perfection of the methods employed in 

 their acquisition. Indeed, it becomes 

 a serious question whether, broadly 

 considered, perfected methods would 

 not lead to worse failure than the ex- 

 isting practice. But we must postpone 

 this aspect of the discussion to another 

 time. 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



French and German Socialism in Modern 

 Times. By Richard T. Ely, Ph. D. 

 New York : Harper & Brothers. Pp. 

 262. Price, 15 cents. 



Professor Ely has here presented in 



small compass and attractive form a large 



amount of information about the notable 



socialistic and communistic schemes that 



have been brought forward in the two coun- 



