But when the whole current of popular tendency sets towards recalcitrance to all discipline and contempt for all culture older than yesterday's newspaper why should sober advisers swell the unthinking chorus?

And whatever the intention of its founders, whatever the present disclaimers of its administrators, that is the practical effect on the public mind of the announcement of the Lincoln School as an experiment in the omission of Latin from the curriculum. It is no more an experiment than the alleged observations described by Emerson in his lecture at Amory Hall in 1844:

"But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing? What was the consequence? Some intelligent person said or thought: 'Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of reason? If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come at their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone out of fashion and I will omit this conjugating and go straight to affairs.' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, or sermons without it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men took even ground at once with the oldest of the regular graduates, and in a few months the most conservative circles of Boston and New York had quite forgotten who of their townsmen were college-bred, and who were not."

Emerson didn't really believe this. He contradicted it flatly in his own practice and in what he wrote about the causes of the superiority of contemporary English culture. He was simply with Emersonian disregard of consistency letting himself go in the expression of a mood, and he expressed himself in a fashion. that leaves little originality to the Lincoln School "experiment" and to Professor Dewey's educational philosophy of the anticipation by children of pragmatical adult ends. It was not Emerson's abiding mood, not a temper that he would have encouraged in any whom he thought likely to abandon themselves to it, not a temper that he would seek to foster if he were living today. It is not the temper that a thoughtful, refined, disciplined, intelligence would lightly choose to stimulate in a population already dizzy with indigestion of radical progressive, pseudo-scientific and emancipating

and anarchic formulas. He would shrink at the thought of the chorus of voices prepared to exaggerate his teaching and apply it to unforeseen consequences which we can only too clearly foresee a world of nothing but ragtime, chewing gum, chocolate sundaes, the wit of the colored Sunday supplements, best sellers, uncensored films, continuous vaudeville-the reverend William Sunday installed in every pulpit, and the racy American idiom of Shorty McCabe displacing in the schoolroom our glorious heritage of English speech one and indivisible the language not only of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, Holmes, and Howells, but of Hamilton, Jefferson, Webster, Lincoln, and Wilson.

Education and the New Order

ALFRED E. STEARNS, PHILLIPS ACADEMY, ANDOVER, MASS.

S

EVERAL years ago a prominent and successful railroad attorney from the middle west arrived in Andover to place his boy in the school. At the opening chapel service of the year he occupied a front seat in the visitors' gallery. When the last boy had left the chapel and I was preparing to follow him my eye fell upon the distinguished visitor making his way up the aisle; and I stopped to greet him. As he extended his hand his reddened eyes and the traces of tears arrested my attention. It was clear that something beyond the ordinary had moved him deeply, and he did not leave me long in doubt as to the cause. "Mr. Stearns," he said with some show of emotion, "I want to tell you something. I'm not much on this church business. The fact is I don't believe I've been inside of a church in twenty years, though I was brought up to attend. But when I sat in the gallery this morning and saw those five hundred boys bow as one man for the morning prayer, something gripped me and I cried like a child. And let me tell you this," he added impulsively, "so long as my boy remains in this school and I have an excuse for visiting this place, I shall attend every chapel exercise I can get to; for this morning's experience means more to me than I can ever express." "" He was true to his word; and for three years his presence in the chapel gallery at the morning service was not an uncommon occurrence; and at the end of each visit there was always the same straightforward expressien of appreciation and gratitude.

At a recent class reunion at the commencement season two classmates, twenty-five years out of school, met to renew the fellowship of boyhood days. In public estimation each had attained distinguished success. One was a leading attorney in the largest of 'American cities, an ex-Cabinet officer, respected for his intellectual ability and his moral worth; the other was a high official in one

of the wealthiest and most powerful of our corporations, a man of high social position and rightly classed as a multi-millionaire. For the greater part of a beautiful June day the two friends had reveled in the renewed fellowship of the days of long ago. They had revisited old and familiar scenes; had discussed classmates, teachers and friends; and had allowed fancy full play as for the moment the cares of a busy world were forgotten and the glow and glamor of school days once more held them in its strong and inspiring grip. As the sun sank nearer the western horizon and the shadows of the elms had lengthened out across the old New England hill, they paused for a moment on the edge of the familiar campus. Lost in thought neither spoke for some time. At length the business man broke the silence. His voice betrayed signs of deep emotion and there was a tone of complaint, almost of peevishness, in his words. "Jack," he said, "we fellows down in New York are not living— we're not living." And then after a monent's pause he added apologetically: "And those of us who have had the privilege of attending such a school as this know better." "And," added his companion, who later related the incident to me, "I felt in the face of that admission that there had been laid bare before me the tragedy of a human life.”

What was it that gripped the heart of that western attorney and wrung the tears from eyes long unaccustomed to their presence? What was it that forced from that successful corporation official the frank and sincere admission that his life was artificial? Why should the conviction be so suddenly forced on these two men, in the one case through the bowed heads of five hundred school boys, and in the other by the renewing of associations of schoool days, that something—the best indeed that life offers—was missing from their lives? Was that successful lawyer thinking of the potential power that lay dormant in those five hundred youthful lives to "make and understand a fireless cooker, a camera, a wireless telegraph?" Was that corporation magnate regretting the time he had misspent on an old-fashioned curriculum instead of devoting it to an "education-obtained from studies that serve a real purpose"? Were these men lamenting the fact that "many of the disagreeable features of education with which under existing circumstances children are compelled to wrestle" had not through

the beneficent instrumentality of the "Modern School" been "eliminated" for them and their children? To ask such questions is to answer them. Men's hearts are not wrung or their deepest emotions stirred by materialistic considerations of such shallow depths; and manhood as well as youth still answers courageously to the call of duty to tackle the unpleasant task, assured that later if not at once the mastering of the hard problem will bring its own reward in the renewal and increase of strength and the satisfaction of work well done.

I have sought to analyze the elements that underlie such incidents as these and picture them satisfactorily to my own comprehension. The problem they supply is known to every schoolmaster. That indefinable something that instinctively grips every thoughtful man who for the first time faces a solid phalanx of eager boys; that something so precious to every old school boy-that sheds such a halo around the school days that memory guards, that turns back to the days of study and play the thoughts of the soldier on the battle-field, the sailor on the restless sea, the man who faces some great crisis in his life or who sees life's sun just tipping the western sky-line-What is it? What does it signify? There is something immensely real about it all. Can we define it?

"Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions," says the old Hebrew prophet. Yes, youth is eternally the period of vision; and the dreams of maturity and old age instinctively carry us back to the days of vision and youth. Before the eager boy the world spreads out, awaiting conquest. Unfettered by the chains of an exacting worldly life, unspoiled by its social blandishments, unscarred by its sordidness and sin, unsoftened by its luxuries and vices, undismayed by its terrors and dangers, unbowed by its responsibilities and burdens-eternal youth looks up and forward, longing, aspiring, confident. But it is not the material gains and rewards which life offers that furnish the challenge and make the strongest appeal. He hopes for these. Probably he expects them. But the challenge that instinctively arrests him is the challenge to his manhood; the appeal that leaves its imperishable impress is the appeal to the soul. It is in the realm of the abstract-not the concrete the realm of the spirit, where lie the foundations of character, the realm where live