APPENDIX A LXIX 



sciences." This good advice, however, simply means, ''You shouldn't 

 be boys, you should be men, and not ordinary men either, but men of 

 'a superior intellectual type." Such advice is vain: we must take boys 

 as we find them and adapt our teaching to their condition of mental, 

 and even moral, development. 



It must be confessed, I think, that the conditions existing in a new 

 country are not favourable to the teaching of history, at least to the 

 young, and that may be part of the difficulty to which our professor 

 referred. In an old country signs and monuments of the past abound. 

 In a new country they are rare, and such as exist do not relate to a very 

 distant past. A past in which our grandfathers lived is almost the 

 present. But, in varying degrees, all historic monuments help to 

 create the historic sense, that sense which makes the past real to us, 

 while it widens and deepens our conception of the life of humanity. A 

 German writer. Otto Jàger, the author of an excellent handbook on 

 the Teaching of History, is of opinion that decidely the best means of 

 arousing the historic sense is the teaching of Latin, inasmuch as it 

 brings before the mind, as hardly anything else can do, the existence 

 ages ago of a people, greatly different from ourselves, who spoke 

 that language, a people who did memorable deeds, founded a powerful 

 state, had their own political struggles, their own foreign wars, and 

 who subdued nation after nation till, finally, the whole world as then 

 known was subject to their sway. That our own language should be 

 shot through with words and forms of speech which once came warm 

 from the mouths of Cicero and Caesar or flowed from the stiles of Vergil 

 and Horace and Ovid, tends powerfully to give to the Latin language the 

 double character of that which has been and yet is. Once make one 

 past real, our author contends, and all pasts may become real. The 

 tyranny of the present and actual has been broken. 



All this may be true; for my part I am disposed to think it is true; 

 but if so it simply means that the best mode of approach to history as a 

 study is not open to the great majority of our young people; for it would 

 be vain to think of introducing the study of Latin into the public schools. 

 There is a further admission to be made which will be regarded, I 

 fear, at least in many quarters — as a most damaging one — that history 

 possesses a certain aristocratic character. Where family traditions and 

 records exist the past is invested with a reality which it cannot have 

 for those in whose personal lives it is practically a blank. Has not 

 "ancient history" become a popular term of contempt? Again, 

 history in its rudimentary stage, as has already been noted, introduces 

 us to kings and heroes, to individuals who stand out from the crowd 

 by the greatness of their deeds and their uncontested leadership. Homer 

 and Shakespeare have both been denounced as incurable and shameless 



