President Eliot, of Harvard, in a recent address, makes a suggestion which is likely to arrest attention. The clergy are likely to have a monopoly of classical education, perhaps of liberal education, if present tendencies are not overcome. One of these tendencies is to give candidates for the ministry a monopoly of Greek study in colleges. President Eliot thinks that increased and more thorough study of English may help in resisting the tendency toward purely mechanical education. English study of a thorough sort requires and promotes classical study. We add our thought that real liberal education is a fruit of study after the school-boy discipline, and that a classical revival and an English literature revival are both clear possibilities of the Chautauquan organization and methods. The most thorough study, with the best helps, is within the plan of our university.
Salmi Morse was last year at this time struggling to exhibit his “Passion Play” in New York. The religious feeling of the country won a conspicuous victory in defeating the purpose of Mr. Morse. Near the end of last month the dramatist drowned himself in the East river, and an actress whose relations to him were questionable, is trying to gain notoriety by a theory that a rejected suitor of hers murdered Mr. Morse. There are a dozen good morals in the story.
Frederick Douglas having at 70 married a white wife, the public has had to listen to a great many homilies on the general subject of inter-marriage among races. We are not about to add another to the long list of sociological essays. We suggest two things: First, it is best to leave the whole matter to individuals. Therefore, the laws which forbid marriage between whites and blacks should be repealed. Second, the real evil—if there be one—is scarcely touched by the prohibitive laws. As Mr. Douglas puts it: It is permitted to white men to beget children by dark-skinned mothers, provided they do not marry these mothers of their copper-colored children. The nobler of two ignoble white men—the one who marries the black mother of his children—should be left in peace until we can invent some means of punishing the ignoble wretch who does not marry her. The former is a very rare man; the growing lights in the African face show us that the other men are numerous.
Everybody has heard of the “Great Eastern” steamship, an eighth of a mile long and thirty feet under water. The great ship was a failure, and after an unsuccessful pursuit of genteel occupations for many years, she has gone to Gibraltar to be used as a coal hulk. If any sailor ever loved this leviathan, he will feel “the pity of it” in this unromantic end; and most of us feel a touch of sadness in reading the story.
The honors paid to the dead Arctic explorers in New York, on Washington’s birthday, lost none of their significance by the association. The flags were at the peak in honor of the father of his country, in the morning; in the afternoon they dropped to half-mast in memorial mourning for the heroes of the ill-fated “Jeannette.” To young eyes seeing both memorial honors, the spectacle must have been inspiring—as showing that the paths to glory are still open to heroic souls. The booming guns, the wistful and reverent throngs, the military tramping along the streets, all had the same cheering lesson. We do not measure men or honor them by success; for utter failure heroically faced we have the funeral pageant and the historic record. We are not at all interested in the North Pole. We soberly think the Arctic exploration business a foolhardy one. But we forget our indifference, and our sober judgment, when we meet the cold corpses of those who have vainly fought the cruel North—and say, “Well done; like heroes you died; like heroes you shall be buried.”