208 PREJUDICE AGAINST INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS. 



the statesmen, lawyers, theologians and scholars of the past have 

 been fed. 



In part historical. In part this predominance of classical studies 

 is an inheritance from times so unlike ours, that the reasons for it 

 no \ou^er exist. In the Dark Ages people did not read. Turn to 

 Ilallaui for (he picture of the dense darkness of the times. 

 According to Pauli, in his life of King Alfred, judges could not 

 read the laws they administered. The revival of learning, and the 

 taking of Constantinople by the Turks, filled Europe with scholars 

 and with books. In what languages should they read and study? 

 In Latin and Greek, for there were no other. In what should they 

 write? In Latin ; for English, German, and French were then un- 

 shaped, or at least thought to be narrow and unsettled. Latin 

 became the language of scholars ; and so late is the sway of this 

 language, that Bacon wrote his Philosophy, Newton his Principia, 

 Milton the Republic's oiBcial letters, and Berkley his Theory of 

 Vision in it. It still lingers in Triennial catalogues and Commence- 

 ment addresses. Formerly these ancient languages were essential 

 to the educated man, for without them literature, science, and pro- 

 fessional knowledge were not to be had. It is so no longer. Ger- 

 man and French will open more treasures of learning than all the 

 languages the earth possessed fifty years ago. The English alone 

 will do it. If Latin and Greek still deserve the predominance they 

 possessed it must be on new grounds, and the fact that what was 

 best educationally in former times is still so in changed condi- 

 tions, if it be a fact, is, as Goldwin Smith has pointed out, a simple, 

 although remarkable coincidence. 



The Greek and Latin books that furnished all the matter of 

 education in old times had much to do with the relative esteem in 

 which science and literature were held. What could the scholars 

 of those times read ? Certainly what the classics contained, not 

 what they did not afford. These books contained treasures of 

 history and poetry ; they discoursed of rhetoric, politics, morals, 

 philosophy, and art. They had comparatively little of science, 

 and almost ncithing of the practical affairs of life. The curious 

 may see this matter clearly set forth in John Mason Good's Book 

 of Nature, Series 2, Lecture eleven. Aristotle, translated from 

 the Arabic, introduced the scholastic philosophy; Greek and Latin 

 brought metaphysics, literature and languages to the schools, and 

 poetry, painting, and sculpture became the pride of courts ; but 

 science, and even mathematics, languished. When Oxford had 



