Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/724

708 question to the utmost, and that the public should be grateful for the smallest contributions to the discussion, the writer of the present essay ventures to add his mite.

It will be found that in most cases the services claimed for the ancient languages are valuable services, and that, if a knowledge of these tongues could render one-tenth of the services alleged, it would be a serious crime to utter a word against their continuance as the staple of education. But what if, under the present mode of teaching classics, many of the alleged services are not rendered? And what if it be the case that, where certain services are rendered, or might be rendered, by a knowledge of classics, they are rendered, or might be rendered, in so far as they are desirable, more economically by other means? I propose to consider some of the arguments offered in defence of the classics, and to show that it would be better to replace Latin and Greek studies by the systematic study of English as the basis of a liberal education.

Among the arguments for the study of the classical languages, it is frequently urged that without it we cannot understand our own language. The English Schools Inquiry Commissioners for 1868 reported that "Latin has entered so largely into English that the meaning of a very large proportion of our words is first discovered to us on learning Latin, and to a no less degree has it entered into English literature, so that many of our classical writers are only half intelligible, unless some Latin precede the reading."

This argument is unsubstantial. Perhaps one man in a thousand of our countrymen has some smattering of Latin, fresh or faded; say one man in a hundred: do the Commissioners mean to aver that ninety-nine men in every hundred of us have not discovered the meaning of "a very large proportion" of what we say?

It is useless to reason with men capable of putting on record, or of accepting, such a proposition. It is useless to point out, what seems obvious enough, that the meaning of a word is determined not by its derivation, but by usage.

If anybody, after ten minutes' reflection, continues in such a belief, he had better have recourse to practical experiment. Let him call a servant a "slave," a sturdy rustic a "pagan," a Presbyterian father of a family a "pope." He will thus be delivered from his error very effectually, if not so agreeably as he might desire.

The same argument is put on a somewhat grander scale. Mr. Clark contends that, "whatever the subject-matter may be, no man can expound it with scientific precision unless he is acquainted with the etymologies and mutual relations of the terms he employs."

English Philology is doubtless an interesting study. Like other artists, the verbal artist takes a pleasure in the makers and the materials of his instruments. And some time might not unprofitably be devoted to the sources of the language, and the leading rules of verbal