642 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



" Greek," when it is only too clear to bystanders that the 

 training which they give is not Greek education at all (as Plato 

 for instance understood it) but the good old Persian prescription 

 and very little else — " to ride and to shoot and to tell the truth." 

 The Greeks, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has reminded us, pre- 

 scribed no " compulsory cuneiform," however much they 

 believed their culture to rest on the Wisdom of the East. 

 They did insist, on the other hand, on intimate acquaintance with 

 their own literature ; music for them, as an educational subject, 

 was a blend of harmony and acoustics ; and their humanists 

 tempered athletics with all the sciences that there were. 



Secondly, some people still remain so far outside the cur- 

 rent of educational thought as to defend the study of Greek on 

 the ground that it is " discipline," tending to the formation of 

 11 character." No one denies that character is formed by effort ; 

 and that some subjects demand more effort than others from 

 average minds. " Tell Harry that Latin is hard," wrote Mr. 

 Gladstone about his son at school, " but it is just because it is 

 hard that it is so well worth learning." But there is effort and 

 effort and it is little use to expect boys to learn to make the 

 right sort of effort as long as the efforts which they are led to 

 regard as most fundamental in their schooling are directed to ends 

 beyond their understanding and carried on by processes which 

 they know to be foolish and futile in any pursuit out of school. 

 Did anybody ever learn to play football or cricket by memorising 

 lists of irregular kicks or rules for composing an eleven ? 



But the strongest stock-argument for " compulsory Greek" is 

 that unless the universities maintain the present form of com- 

 pulsion "Greek will die out"; the suggestion being that if Greek 

 die out in England unmentionable evils will follow. These evils 

 being unmentioned are not easily to be discussed in this article. 

 But will Greek die out ? Surely Oxford and Cambridge, serious 

 institutions as they are, are taking themselves just a trifle too 

 seriously. Are they not using precisely the argument which 

 will convince the enemies of " Greek " that if they can but force 

 the " last ditch," as it is called locally, the " Greek" which they 

 hate will be extinguished for good and all ; and also that if the 

 last ditch did not defend this particular stronghold from invasion 

 no one would care much about anything Greek. 



The theological argument which is used now and then in 

 Convocation is only a special case of the argument that " Greek 



