ES es a 
en 
PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 23 
“T believe that French and German, if properly taught, which 
I admit they rarely are at present, would go far to replace Latin 
and Greek from a disciplinary point of view, while the actual 
value of the acquisition would in the majority of cases be incom- 
parably greater. In half the time usually devoted without success 
to the classical languages, most boys would acquire a really service- 
able knowledge of French and German. History and the serious 
study of English literature, now shamefully neglected, would also 
find a place in such a scheme.” 
Herbert Spencer, in his essay upon Education which appeared 
in the Westminster Review for July, 1859, since reprinted with 
his other works on Education, makes the following remarks :— 
“ Among mental as among bodily acquisitions, the ornamental 
comes before the useful. Not only in times past, but almost as 
much in our own era, that knowledge which conduces to personal 
well-being has been postponed to that which brings applause. 
“In the Greek schools, music, poetry, rhetoric and philosophy, 
which, until Socrates taught, had but little bearing upon action, 
were the dominant subjects ; while knowledge aiding the arts of 
life had a very subordinate place. And in our own Universities 
and schools at the present moment, the like antithesis holds. We 
are guilty of something like a platitude when we say that through- 
out his after-career, a boy, in nine cases out of ten, applies his 
Latin and Greek to no practical purposes. The remark is trite 
that in his shop or his office, in managing his estate or his family, 
in playing his part as director of a bank or a railway, he is very 
little aided by his knowledge he took so many years to acquire— 
So little that generally the greater part of it drops out of his 
memory ; and, if he occasionally vents a Latin quotation or alludes 
to some Greek myth, it is less to throw light on the topic in hand 
than for the sake of effect. If we inquire what is the real motive 
for giving boys a classical education, we find it to be simply con- 
formity to public opinion. Men dress their children’s minds, as 
they do their bodies, in the prevailing fashion. As the Orinoco 
Indian puts on paint before leaving his hut, not with a view to 
