136 



TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



the dead languages, and of our ordinary collegiate curriculum, as it is 

 called. 



At the time those languages were first introduced into the schools of 

 modern Europe, those nations had no written vernacular language of 

 their own ; no art, no science, no theology, no law, no literature of any 

 sort, that was not written in Latin and Greek; then, of course, the study 

 of these languages was not only the most practical of all possible studies, 

 but it was the only possible study, so far as books and schools were con- 

 cerned. Those who knew these languages constituted a scholastic, or 

 learned, ruling class, and all other people learned nothing, and could 

 learn nothing, and knew nothing from schools or books of any sort; and 

 this necessary beginning of things, taken in connection with the stupid 

 inertia, and the conservative force of mere habit, so natural to all men, 

 and especially to all thoroughly schooled men, fully explains all that has 

 since followed and all that now exists. It all grew out of this one root 

 of dire necessity, like all the direful tyrannies and scare-crow theologies 

 that emanated from the same iron age. There was no assembly of wise 

 and grave men that met together to deliberate upon what was best for 

 this human race as such, and to recommend it, because it was the best. 

 On the contrary, the knaves, who ruled the state and the church, had, by 

 their unjust oppression and tyranny, so crushed the people, body and 

 soul, into the earth, that they had no government they could submit to, 

 but a tyranny; no faith they could believe, but a self-evident absurdity; 

 no language they could study, no science, no literature and no art, but only 

 Latin and Greek. The people wisely took what they had, and tried to 

 do the best they could with them. We ought to do the same. But 

 most surely all must admit that in such an age the study of the classics, 

 as they are called, was most eminently pi-actical. What could be more 

 practical, when they were the only possible school-study of any sort.'' 



Again, I well remember when I was a boy, whether by force of law 

 or custom, or both combined I can not now say, in the Eastern States no 

 man could get into the regular ministry, or the practice of law or medi- 

 cine, or hold any high position or office whatever, in church or state, who 

 had not been through a regular course of Latin and Greek, at some 

 approved college. New England was then ruled by scholiasts and 

 theologians as rigorously, in fact, as Italy is by the ecclesiastics now. I 

 do not say that their rule was, on the whole, a bad one for that people 

 and that age ; I only say it existed. Through college — through a regular 

 course of Latin and Greek of some sort, the only road lay, to social, 

 professional, or political distinction of any sort; and the schools outside 

 of the regular colleges and academies, consecrated almost exclusively to 

 the study of Latin and Greek, afforded but a veiy meager pittance even 

 of rudimental knowledge for any purpose whatever. 



A young man in this age of the world can not possibly conceive how 

 utterly all hope of social distinction was bound up in Latin, and labeled 

 in Greek in the minds of all the boys of my age, and the ages before 

 tliat. True we read of Washington, Franklin, Sherman and others of 

 the precccding Revolutionary age; but that was an age of miracles. 



