533 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



grudged the time spent in practising the goose-step, since there was 

 no doubt as to the enhanced rate of progress when marching began. 

 But times are changing. We will not say that competition is increas- 

 ing — our fathers made the same assertion, and their fathers before 

 them — but it is spreading. The public-school boy, notwithstanding the 

 severe discipline of the classics, finds it hard work to hold his own 

 against boys who have not had the benefit of this drill. Conditions 

 have recently changed in a remarkable way. It is no longer a com- 

 petition between boys all of whom have had either a grammar-school 

 training or none at all. Public elementary schools, higher-grade 

 schools, county schools, technical institutes are pouring their students 

 into the upper ranks of the labor market. These students may be 

 superlatively ignorant of classical grammar, but they have certain 

 kinds of knowledge and certain forms of dexterity which make them 

 hard to beat. A very large number of public-school boys are obliged 

 to find a sphere for their more generalized attainments on the ranches 

 of North America and the sheep runs of Australia and New Zealand. 

 If, reluctantly, we abandon the classical drill which has secured our 

 confidence by three centuries of undeniable success, we must be well 

 assured that the tactics which we teach in its place are effective in the 

 modern world. 



That the study of language ought to occupy a predominant position 

 in school life is overwhelmingly proved by grammar-school experience. 

 I think, too, we must also allow that the fact that the school-boy never 

 contemplates the classical languages as possible means of communica- 

 tion is in their favor. 



The conclusion which appears to me to be established beyond all 

 possibility of doubt, both by the positive evidence of the value of a 

 grammar-school training and by the negative evidence of the difficulty 

 which attends the acquisition of foreign languages in adult or even 

 adolescent life, is that training in language is of the essence of educa- 

 tion in early years. It is of the essence of education in early years 

 because it is only then that it is effective; and, further, because train- 

 ing in expression means giving precision to thought. Thinking and 

 expressing thought in words are so inseparably connected that widen- 

 ing the range of expression is equivalent to expanding the field of 

 thought. The benefit of a classical education depends to a large extent 

 upon the fact that for years a boy's finger is kept between the pages 

 of a dictionary. He learns new words and comes to feel the importance 

 of accurate definition. Words are the tesserce of thought. Their 

 arrangement in patterns is thinking. The mosaic of words shows by 

 its richness or its poverty, its boldness or its uncertainty, its simplicity 

 or its confusion and redundancy, the quality of thought. Expressing 

 is thinking. The schoolmen of the Middle Ages attached so much 

 importance to dialectic that they came at last to confuse success in the 



