256 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
and strengthens the mind, but it leaves out culture. Metaphysics and logic and 
all philosophy of the mind or of the morals cannot be mastered by one who is 
ignorant of Greek. It is the key to poetry and to art, which are rightly under- 
stood only by those who rightly understand the Greek spirit and temper, and in 
the intellectual life there is no achievement and no perfection which is not so 
interwoven with Greek influences and teaching as to vindicate for the language 
of Greece a higher place than has ever been claimed for it in the customary 
schemes of classical study. 
Let us not be misunderstood as undervaluing the practical demands of the age, 
with which Greek has little or nothing to do. We recognize that the primal duty 
of every citizen is to provide for the material wants of his nature. But if success 
in life means mere material success — dollars and cents — then, if experience goes 
for anything, the best education is no education at all. Not only is the study of 
Greek a loss of time, but all study is loss and waste. Our colleges are luxuries 
and our sons are wronged when we do not put them on their own resources at 
ten years of age to work their way to a fortune first and to education afterward. 
But if education has any meaning and any value, if the systematic training 
of the mind is worth considering, if it is worth more in itself and in its conse- 
quences than the random picking up of information here and there as we go on, 
then the study of Greek is so far removed above the reach of disparagement that 
it needs no apologist. Its structure is the most perfect, its capacity the greatest^ 
its resources the most ample, its beauty the most admirable of all languages, and 
as the human race in all its history has never produced another so perfect language 
there is no reason to expect that it will ever do it in the future. 
Even in our daily lives the best and highest influences still come from the 
old Greek culture and development. Philosophy has never gone beyond the 
Socratic level; poetry still calls Homer master; in every branch of literature the 
best models are still Greek models; there has been no art since Greek art died, 
save the Gothic architecture and the Renaissance in painting. We cannot escape 
from the influence of the Greeks if we would. 
The stars in the heavens still bear the names given them from Grecian myth- 
ology ; the legends and history of Greece are part of the common stock of the 
world's phrases, and the unlettered citizen who reads in the daily paper of the , 
cup of Tantalus or of the sword of Damocles does not write to the editor to 
know what he means. The multifold millionaire does not name his yacht the 
Wabash or the Wamsutta, but recalls the sweet story of the snowy- footed Arca- 
dian, Atalanta. Even the politician who would trace back the current of human 
freedom to its source does not stop with Thomas Jefferson or with Brutus : he 
must go back to Solon and Lycurgus, to Harmodius and Aristogiton. 
And we are asked to believe that the language which holds and guards this 
wealth has no value in itself! The proposition is inherently absurd. It involves 
a contradiction in terms : it denies what it asserts. As long as the instincts of 
humanity lead upwards and the need of a higher life of the mind is recognized, 
the language and literature of Greece will have the value of standard gold, and 
