Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/28

 periods seem to me too short, and the men should be compelled to read them not in English manuals but in the great foreign historians. To my poor apprehension the real blot on the School is not the one that has been alleged, but the want of any provision that the student shall have some grip of several foreign languages. At present Latin is the only tongue with which he is compelled to show some acquaintance. Scores of men every year escape any touch with French, German, or Italian by offering those two special subjects—India and the Great Rebellion—where all the prescribed books are in English. And even of Latin the amount required is so small that a man may obtain a first class without being able to translate a simple Classical author with reasonable accuracy. I speak of this from personal experience. Nothing, therefore, can be more cheering than the news that the Hebdomadal Council is just about to bring forward a statute enabling us to make a knowledge of modern languages compulsory on all our candidates.

But I must not wander from the point which I am now engaged in urging. It seems to me that we must frankly recognize that the Modern History curriculum must be drawn up rather with an eye to the vast majority of men who seek in it a general liberal education, than to the small minority to whom a technical training in historiography might conceivably be more profitable. And further, I think that even for this minority the present School is an excellent base for their later studies, and a base with which they cannot dispense. For of all things the most necessary for the researcher is a very broad knowledge of the general trend of history far outside the limits of his special period. Unless he has this, he risks making the