Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/807

Rh himself a year. This meant six-fifty-seconds of his time. He was satisfied with very little—with less, perhaps, than was quite wise. If we more than double his figures, and remember that co-operative labor is far more productive than Thoreau's solitary hoeing, we may agree that one quarter of the waking life must go for bread. But we have still a large margin. If we allow the full measure of life, say fourscore years, one quarter of it would be just twenty years. A man working full time from his twentieth to his fortieth year ought still to preserve both his youth and old age from industrialism. Or working industrially for half the day, which would perhaps be wiser, his term of industrial service would stretch from twenty to sixty years of age, and would still leave the extremes of life free for preparation and reflection. I believe this to be a complete answer to the objection, and I have an unquestioning faith that society will some time, when its conscience is aroused, limit its industrialism to the years of maturity and of strength, and will not bind its burdens upon tender childhood and infirm old age.

But the answer, I said, is twofold. You may not share the social optimism that I have been setting forth. The second answer is quite as complete as the first, and is applicable to society as it is, or even to a society still more selfish and unchristian. The second answer is that, no matter when interrupted, a rational scheme of organic education is still the best that could have been given up to that time, and for its justification does not need academic completeness. I may say, in passing, that this is not true of the present curriculum. While the schools under the present lowly evolved social conditions must teach in a measure as if each utterance were to be their last, much of the work must, nevertheless, depend for its value upon a reasonable degree of completeness. This is particularly true of classical lines of study. Even in Germany, where the classics have a hold far ahead of anything they have here, educational philosophers are urging with increasing insistence that the main value of classical study lies in the content and only incidentally in the discipline. And you may know that in obedience to this thought the study of Greek is being urged more than that of Latin because the Greek ideals of literature and art and morals and life are so immensely superior to the Roman.

This thought, carried to its extreme, will of course land us in the position of the scientific humanists—if I may so name my own party—who bring to the study of classical writers an almost passionate devotion, but who study them solely for their content, and therefore in translation, in their own modern mother tongue, be it English or German or French.

A child can not enter into Greek as literature with less than from four to six years' study. If this be interrupted, the discipline of course