558 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



upon public affairs, because science is 

 allegiance to truth, while current poli- 

 tics is little else than allegiance to lies. 

 No man expects that a politician will 

 be honest, or candid, or truthful, or 

 make a bold and honorable avowal of 

 principles; nor is there any possible 

 ground to hope that our politics will 

 purify themselves by any working of 

 their internal elements so that men of 

 probity, high character, and real great- 

 ness will be put in the positions of 

 power. The regenerative influence, if 

 it comes at all, must come from other 

 sources, and we expect it to come 

 sooner or later from the great move- 

 ment of modern science, which must 

 bring with it a new training in the 

 intellectual virtues. It is to the new 

 conceptions and new culture of science 

 that we look for the production of men 

 of a higher quality for public use to 

 replace that lower quality which has 

 ceased to command the admiration of 

 intelligent and honorable-minded peo- 

 ple. Our politics is to-day the despair 

 of our most earnest citizens, and we 

 can see no possible escape from its cor- 

 ruption and its degradation but by the 

 supply of new men animated by higher 

 ideas, qualified by superior intelligence, 

 and trained in reverence for truth, and 

 these men are to be produced by the 

 slowly ripening influence of science, as 

 it comes gradually to pervade our edu- 

 cational systems. Of course, no great 

 change of this kind can be suddenly 

 precipitated ; it must be a slow growth, 

 to work effectual results; but science 

 advances with its work, and gives us 

 some ground of hope even in the most 

 discouraging of all the fields of human 

 effort. 



ED UCA TION WI TfTO UT DEAD LA N- 

 GUAOES. 



Oxe would think that the advocates 

 of the classics, as the one superior sys- 

 tem for the unfolding of the human 

 mind, would have long ago abated their 

 exclusive pretensions in face of the fact 



that such multitudes fail with it, and 

 that so many succeed without it. It is 

 not found difficult to evade the force of 

 the first objection that great numbers 

 of dead-language students come to noth- 

 ing with their classics, because it is said 

 that they neglect their opportunities, or 

 get far more good from this source than 

 they are ever aware of. But it is not 

 so easy to escape the objection to the 

 wonderful worth of defunct speech in 

 the cultivation of the human faculties 

 with such multiplying evidence as we 

 have of great intellectual power acquired 

 by a mental cultivation into which the 

 dead languages have never entered. 

 That these studies have declined in con- 

 sideration, and are put upon the de- 

 fensive, and fall back upon tradition 

 and authority for backing, is simply be- 

 cause other instruments of culture in 

 these modern times are not only com- 

 peting with them but are beating them 

 everywhere. Accompanying the de- 

 cline of the classics, there has arisen 

 an outside education, irregular in form, 

 unguided by institutions, self-inspired 

 and self-shaped, which is full of great re- 

 sults. The past generation has abound- 

 ed in men who have either turned their 

 backs upon the universities, after trying 

 them, or who have never gone near 

 them, but who have become leaders of 

 thought in all departments of intellect- 

 ual activity. The unfortunate creatures 

 who have been enticed to college, and 

 there loaded down with a knapsack of 

 dead languages have found, as was very 

 natural, that they were overweighted 

 in the competitive race of practical life, 

 and left behind by those whose acqui- 

 sitions are better adapted to the new 

 requirements of the age. Charles Dar- 

 win went to the university, neglected 

 the classics, and made what he could 

 out of it for the promotion of his natu- 

 ral history studies ; and Herbert Spen- 

 cer refused to be lured there at all. 

 Yet these are the men who are guiding 

 the mind of the age, while for twenty 

 years we have been afflicted with the 



