1883.] Editors’ Table. 847 
“How did Harvard College prepare me and my ninety-two 
classmates of the year 1856 for our work ina life in which we 
have had these homely precepts brought close to us? In an- 
swering the question it is not altogether easy to preserve one’s 
gravity. The college fitted us for this active, bustling, hard-hit- 
ting, many-tongued world, caring nothing for auth ority and little 
for the past, but full of its living thought and living issues, in 
dealing with which there was no man who did not stand in press- 
ing and constant need of every possible preparation as respects 
knowledge and exictitude and thoroughness—the poor old col- 
lege prepared us to play our parts in this world by compelling us, 
directly and indirectly, to devote the best part of our school lives 
to acquiring a confessedly superficial knowledge of two dead 
languages.” 
After narrating the history of his ancestors’ connection with 
Harvard, and showing the small value to their subsequent ca- 
reers of the Greek they there so laboriously acquired, he speaks 
as follows: 
“Such is a family and individual experience covering a century 
and a half. With that experience behind me, I have sons of my 
own coming forward. I want them to go to college—to Harvard 
College—but I do not want them to go there by the path their 
fathers trod; it seems to me that four generations ought to suf- 
ce. Neither is my case a single one. I am, on the contrary, 
one of a large class in the community, very many of whom are 
more imbued than I with the scientific and thorough spirit of the 
age. As respects our children, the problem before us is a simple 
one, and yet one very difficult of practical solution. We want no 
more classical veneer. Whether on furniture or in education, we 
do not admire veneer. Either impart to our children the dead 
languages thoroughly, or the Jiving languages thoroughly; or, 
better yet, let them take their choice of either. This is just what 
the colleges do not do. On the contrary, Harvard stands directly 
in the way of whata century and a half’s experience tells me is 
all important.” e 
These extracts suffice to show the feeling with which one of 
the most thoroughly Harvardized of Boston’s children regards 
his alma mater. But we are glad to know that the Harvard of 
to-day offers ever increasing facilities for the acquisition of posi- 
tive knowledge, and for the training of the mind in the apprehen- 
sion and pursuit of truth. Any other course would be suicidal, 
and in failing to adopt it, the majority of our colleges are simply 
digging their own graves. 
