men must pass to get at that knowledge.'

He points out that the books then existing were manuscript, and very dear; and that 'so few were the learned readers sixty years after the invention of printing, that it appears by letters still extant between the printers in 1499 that they could not throughout Europe find purchasers for more than three hundred copies of any ancient authors.' Franklin further says that when printing began to make books cheap, 'Gradually several branches of science began to appear in the common languages; and at this day the whole body of science, consisting not only of translations from all the valuable ancients, but of all the new modern discoveries, is to be met with in those languages, so that learning the ancient for the purpose of acquiring knowledge is become absolutely unnecessary.'

In the present state of the surviving prescription of Latin in secondary schools and colleges, there is another objection to it which has much force. If a college requires three units of Latin for admission but no Latin in college, it inflicts on boys in preparatory schools three years of study of Latin which in many instances will lead to nothing during the education which they receive between eighteen and twenty-two or thereabout. At this moment, for most pupils in preparatory schools, who under compulsion give one fifth of their school-time to the study of Latin for three years, the Classical road leads to a dead-end, when they have once passed their admission examination in Latin. Such dead-ends, no matter what the subject, are always deplorable in what should be a progressive course in education. Even if the college in which the student seeks the degree of Bachelor of Arts prescribes some further study of Latin, the amount of that

prescription is always small; so that the student who abandons Latin when that prescription has been fulfilled has not made a really thorough acquaintance with Latin, and has therefore wasted a large part of the time he has devoted to it. In other words, the present prescription in school and college is against the interest of the greater part of the pupils and students who submit to the prescription. Only those who would have chosen Latin without prescription escape injury from it.

It is a fanciful idea that to understand Greek and Roman civilization and to appreciate the historians, philosophers, orators, military heroes, and patriots of Greece and Rome, one must be able to read Greek and Latin. The substance of Greek and Roman thought and experience can be got at in translations. It is only the delicacies and refinements of style and of poetical expression which are, as a rule, lost in translations. Let the future poets, preachers, artists in words, and men of letters generally give a large part of their time in school and college, if they will, to Greek and Latin; but do not compel the boys and girls who have no such gift or intention to learn a modicum of Latin.

It is often asserted that the study of Latin gives a boy or girl a mental discipline not otherwise to be obtained, a discipline peculiarly useful to those who have no taste or gift for the study. As a matter of fact, it has doubtless often happened that pupils in secondary schools got through Latin the best training they actually received; because their teachers of Latin were the best teachers in their schools, the best equipped and the most scholarly. The Classical schools have been the best schools, and the Classical teachers the best teachers. Gradually, within the past forty years, teachers of modern languages, English, the sciences, and

history have been trained in the colleges and universities, who are as scholarly and skillful in their respective fields as any Classical teachers. They can teach boys and girls to observe, to think, and to remember in the new subjects quite as well as the teachers of Greek and Latin can in those traditional subjects. At least, they think they can; and many parents and educational administrators think that the new subjects and teachers should have a free opportunity to prove this contention. That is all that the proposal to abolish the requirement of Latin for the degree of Bachelor of Arts really

means.

Accompanying the production of well-equipped teachers of the new subjects, has come a better understanding of the way to get intense application, concentrated attention, and the hardest kind of mental work out of children, and indeed out of adults too. People generally recognize nowadays that children, like adults, can do their best and hardest work only in subjects or for objects which keenly interest them. Hence uniform prescriptions for all pupils at school are seen to be inexpedient, except in learning to use the elementary tools of learning; and even there much accommodation to individual peculiarities is desirable. Everybody agrees that power to apply one's self and to work hard mentally is the main object of education; but nearly everybody also has come to know that inspiration or stimulation of interest in any mental work will produce this power to work hard more quickly and more thoroughly than any driving process, no matter what the means of compulsion — rattan, ruler, staying after school, holding up to ridicule, deprivation of play or holidays, or copying pages of French or Latin.

Encouragement with respect to the changes to come may be drawn from

the changes already achieved. Two generations ago the requirements for admission to Harvard College were Latin, Greek, elementary Mathematics, and the barest elements of Ancient Geography and History; and to those requirements the courses in good secondary schools were accommodated; for the requirements of other American colleges differed from those of Harvard College only in measure or degree and not in substance. To-day the subjects accepted for admission to the Freshman class of Harvard College embrace English, elementary Greek, Latin, German, French, or Spanish, advanced German, advanced French, Ancient History, Medieval and Modern History, English History, American History and Civil Government, elementary Algebra and Plane Geometry, Physics, Chemistry, Geography, Botany and Zoology, advanced Greek, advanced Latin, advanced History, advanced Algebra, Solid Geometry, Logarithms and Trigonometry, Freehand Drawing, and Mechanical Drawing. From this long list of subjects the candidate for admission has a wide range of choice, although certain groupings are prescribed. Nevertheless, Harvard College still requires of every candidate for admission that he shall have studied elementary Latin three years in his secondary school four or five hours a week- a condition of admission which thirty-six considerable American universities, including Columbia University, no longer prescribe. All the other leading American universities have adopted to a greater or less extent the new subjects for admission which Harvard has adopted, and only four out of seventy-six leading American universities and colleges retain conditions of admission at all resembling those of Harvard College in the year 1850.

No one can reasonably maintain that the American educated generation to

day is less well equipped for its life work than the generation which graduated from the American colleges in 1850. On the contrary, all the old professions maintain a much higher standard for admission and in practice than they maintained in 1850, and a large group of new professions has been added to the old. Moreover, business, including agriculture, manufacturing, trading, and distributing, has become to a much greater extent than formerly an intellectual calling, demanding good powers of observation, concentration, and judgment. There was a time when the principal part of the work of universities was training scholarly young men for the service of the Church, the Bar, and the State; and all such young men needed, or were believed to need, an intimate knowledge of Greek and Latin; but now, and for more than a hundred years, universities are called on to train young men for public ser

vice in new democracies, for a new medical profession, and for finances, journalism, transportation, manufacturing, the new architecture, the building of vessels and railroads, and the direction of great public works which improve agriculture, conserve the national resources, provide pure watersupplies, and distribute light, heat, and mechanical power. The practitioners of these new professions can profit in so many directions by other studies in youth, that they ought not all indiscriminately to be obliged to study Latin.

The new education since the Civil War has met the rising demands of the times in some measure; but the newer education must go forward more rapidly on the same lines. The rising generations will not prove inferior to the older. With better and more varied training their educated leaders will rise to ever higher levels of bodily vigor, mental capacity, and moral character.

I

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS is quite the most American thing we have produced. Almost all that one can profitably say of him distributes itself about this central magnetizing fact. Of the lessons he has taught us, no other seems half so important as the supreme value of having a home, a definitely local habitation, not to tear one's self away from, to sigh for, to idealize through a mist of melancholy and Weltschmerz, but simply and solely to live in, to live for. This part of his doctrine, more than any other, has the noble force of an eternal verity preached with striking timeliness. It is in itself the special crown of Mr. Howells, the open secret of his democratic grandeur; and it wins double emphasis because it had to be urged against the sterile æsthetic cosmopolitanism of the eighteen-eighties. Both his historical importance and, one may confidently hope, his permanence are affirmed by his anchorage in a provincialism as remote from mere provinciality as from the opposite extreme of cosmopolitanism the 'wise the 'wise provincialism' of Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty.

Moreover, the work of Mr. Howells, the most soundly representative expression of America as a spirit, is also the most broadly representative of America as a civilization. It falls in the era of the great transitions of our national life, the confusion of shifting

ideals and mislaid ideas which led to the most American thing we have ever done our specialization of everything. The war is over, and Howells comes back from his Venetian consulship to watch the phenomena of reconstruction, the emergence of a more centralized political system, and the dawn of a new unity. Agriculture grows relatively less important, manufacturing relatively more so; and thereupon begins the flux of young men and women from village to city, from farm to factory and office, and the consequent specialization of multitudes of lives. In industry, the epoch of individual enterprise merges into that of great combinations and corporate monopolies; business too becomes specialized. As commerce gains respectability, idleness becomes dubious and finally odious; and the result is a cleavage between generations in many a patrician family, the parents clinging to an old ideal of the leisured ornamental life, the sons drawn by a new ideal of useful prestige.

When the new aristocracy of vigor has supplanted the old aristocracy of cultivation, there arises the new cultivation, through efficiency. The laboring class, disproportionately augmented by immigration, develops a self-consciousness; its problems become insistent and terrible. In the professions, the general practitioner of an elder time turns into the specialist. Journalism and advertising- the quintessen

tially modern professions - begin to have their day. Among women, too, a ferment is at work: they swarm through doors once closed, they begin to know something, subtle changes take place in the home, marriage itself hears questions asked of it and knows that sooner or later it must answer them. Dogmatic theology is sharply challenged when the physical sciences reconceive the world, and the social sciences the people in it. The sense of an organic unity replaces that of an organized unity and the world begins to wonder what purpose it serves, what it can possibly mean. Casting about, it begins to think it sees a purpose in unity itself. And through the confusion there crystallizes slowly the dream' of a real society in which the common interests shall overthrow the conflicting ones. In a score of ways the America of 1875 was at the crossroads. And William Dean And William Dean Howells was the man who was there with her to see everything. He saw and he understood.

All these tendencies and forces the recital of them may be tedious, but it is certainly indispensable — are charted in the fiction of Mr. Howells, with an amplitude and a fidelity applied elsewhere, as in the novels of Trollope, to much narrower sectors of life, but never before in English to all the important phases in the life of a whole nation. It is as lavish as anything since Balzac, and it is focal. Howells is master of village and town, farm and city, New England and the Middle West; he is at home in factory and lumber-camp; he knows artisan and idler, preacher and teacher, the scientist, the journalist, the commercial traveler, the nouveaux-riches and their débutante daughter, the country squire, the oldest inhabitant, the village scapegrace and the village fool, the doctor and the lawyer; he misses nothing, as a review written by his greatest

American contemporary once phrased it, of 'the real, the natural, the colloquial, the moderate, the optimistic, the domestic, and the democratic.'

And he has through all this, in addition to the notion of where we are, the vision of where we are going. His novels convey the impression of greater lapses of time than any one of them actually records, because each one of them is an inquiry into something that is about to become something else. The Rise of Silas Lapham, our first and best analysis of the self-made man and of the social implications of his money, is a tragedy whose significance reaches nearly the whole of self-made America. Written at the nexus of so many tendencies and interests, the novel remains to-day as poignantly contemporary as ever, a drama of transitions not yet more than half accomplished. We clamor still for 'the great American novel'? Why, we have been reading it these thirty years and more.

II

A comment of thirty years ago, written by one of the most unflattering of critics, has at least the merit of confirming, from a hostile and derogatory point of view, this fact of Mr. Howells's provincialism. 'Henry James,' said Mr. George Moore in Confessions of a Young Man, 'went to France and read Tourguénieff. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James. . . . I have no doubt that at one time of his life Henry James said, I will write the moral history of America, as Tourguénieff wrote the moral history of Russia he borrowed at first-hand, understanding what he was borrowing. W. D. Howells borrowed at secondhand, and without understanding what he was borrowing.'

These remarks, whether or not we can agree to find in them something