Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/42

 either in reading or speaking any one. I have had some training in three languages besides my native tongue, but if I am in any degree able to estimate the relative benefits to me of the various subjects which I pursued preparatory to entering college I have no hesitancy in saying that my study of Latin meant more to me than anything else I did and means more to me today. History bored me, so I worked very little at it; mathematics required little study on my part, so though I received high grades in it I really derived little discipline from it, science I liked, but it did not require any strenuous effort to get by the examinations. Latin was to me the most difficult of all. I toiled at it; I dug out laboriously each word and phrase and sentence; I committed my declensions and my paradigms with painful slowness, but I held myself to the task, and I accomplished it with rather more than average success.

I can read today, after thirty years, with some fluency every Latin text I ever studied. I got more idea of concentration and accuracy and coördination out of the subject than from anything else. It was the one thing that gave me mental discipline; it was the thing that required of me most serious study. Perhaps it might not accomplish the same result for others; perhaps for you that result would be brought about through some other means; but for me, it was the Latin that did it, so when I hear a boy say, "What possible good could Latin do me?" I tell him my story, and I try to show him