Permit me, therefore, before we separate, to say a few words on this glaring contrast. The greatest man of war and of silence which the present age has produced once asserted that perpetual peace is a dream, and not a beautiful dream at that. We may accord to this profound student of mankind a judgment in these matters and can also appreciate the soldier's horror of stagnation from all too lengthy peace. But it requires a strong belief in the insuperableness of mediæval barbarism to hope for and to expect no great improvement in international relations. Think of our forefathers and of the times when club law ruled supreme, when within the same country and the same state brutal assaults and equally brutal self-defence were universal and self-evident. This state of affairs grew so oppressive that finally a thousand and one circumstances compelled people to put an end to it, and the cannon had most to say in accomplishing the work. Yet the rule of club law was not abolished so quickly after all. It had simply passed to other clubs. We must not abandon ourselves to dreams of the Rousseau type. Questions of law will in a sense forever remain questions of might. Even in the United States where every one is as a matter of principle entitled to the same privileges, the ballot according to Stallo's pertinent remark is but a milder substitute for the club. Nor need I tell you that many of our own fellow-citizens are still enamored of the old original methods. Very, very gradually, however, as civilisation progresses, the intercourse of men takes on gentler forms, and no one who really knows the good old times will ever honestly wish them back again, however beautifully they may be painted and rhymed about.
In the intercourse of the nations, however, the old club law still reigns supreme. But since its rule is taxing the intellectual, the moral, and the material resources of the nations to the utmost and constitutes scarcely less a burden in peace than in war, scarcely less a yoke for the victor than for the vanquished, it must necessarily grow more and more unendurable. Reason, fortunately, is no longer the exclusive possession of those who modestly call themselves the upper ten thousand. Here, as everywhere, the evil itself will awaken the intellectual and ethical forces which are destined to mitigate it. Let the hate of races and of nationalities run riot as it may, the intercourse of nations will still increase and grow more intimate. By the side of the problems which separate nations, the great and common ideals which claim the exclusive powers of the men of the future appear one after another in greater distinctness and in greater might.
[ON INSTRUCTION IN THE CLASSICS AND THE SCIENCES.][113]
Perhaps the most fantastic proposition that Maupertuis,[114] the renowned president of the Berlin Academy, ever put forward for the approval of his contemporaries was that of founding a city in which, to instruct and discipline young students, only Latin should be spoken. Maupertuis's Latin city remained an idle wish. But for centuries Latin and Greek institutions exist in which our children spend a goodly portion of their days, and whose atmosphere constantly surrounds them, even when without their walls.
For centuries instruction in the ancient languages has been zealously cultivated. For centuries its necessity has been alternately championed and contested. More strongly than ever are authoritative voices now raised against the preponderance of instruction in the classics and in favor of an education more suited to the needs of the time, especially for a more generous treatment of mathematics and the natural sciences.
In accepting your invitation to speak here on the relative educational value of the classical and the mathematico-physical sciences in colleges and high schools, I find my justification in the duty and the necessity laid upon every teacher of forming from his own experiences an opinion upon this important question, as partly also in the special circumstance that in my youth I was personally under the influence of school-life for only a short time, just previous to my entering the university, and had, therefore, ample opportunity to observe the effects of widely different methods upon my own person.
Passing now, to a review of the arguments which the advocates of instruction in the classics advance, and of what the adherents of instruction in the physical sciences in their turn adduce, we find ourselves in rather a perplexing position with respect to the arguments of the first named. For these have been different at different times, and they are even now of a very multifarious character, as must be where men advance, in favor of an institution that exists and which they are determined to retain at any cost, everything they can possibly think of. We shall find here much that has evidently been brought forward only to impress the minds of the ignorant; much, too, that was advanced in good faith and which is not wholly without foundation. We shall get a fair idea of the reasoning employed by considering, first, the arguments that have grown out of the historical circumstances connected with the original introduction of the classics, and, lastly, those which were subsequently adduced as accidental afterthoughts.