“Exegi momentum acre perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius.”
Let him ask some classicist to translate off-hand this common school boy’s tag from a most popular author and note whether they can place the author or translate the lines. Here is another:
Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,
Tendimus in Latium.
To speak in plain United States, when it comes to the showdown it will be found that those of us who argue in favor of the modern discipline (in so far as we have any knowledge of classical literature) know more about them than those whose sole defence they are.
It is said by the classicists that a knowledge of Latin and Greek is necessary to an adequate comprehension of the English language. But so is the knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, French and Italian. And when it comes to facility and clearness of expression, it will be found that Huxley’s prose is superior to that of Matthew Arnold, and Brisbane’s superior to that of any professor of the Latin language in Harvard or Yale. So much for the ghost fighters. Requiescant in pace!
The Knowledge We Need
Now, what is the knowledge which the New Negro needs most? He needs above all else a knowledge of the wider world and of the long past. But that is history, modern and ancient: History as written by Herodotus and John Bach McMaster; sociology not as conceived by Giddings, but as presented by Spencer and Ward, and anthropology as worked out by Boas and Thomas. The Negro needs also the knowledge of the best thought; but that is literature as conceived, not as a collection of flowers from the tree of life, but as its garnered fruit. And, finally, the Negro needs a knowledge of his own kind, concerning which we shall have something to say later, And the purposes of this knowledge? They are, to know our place in the human processus, to strengthen our minds by contact with the best and most useful thought-products evolved during the long rise of man from anthropoid to scientist; to inspire our souls and to lift our race industrially, commercially, intellectually to the level of the best that there is in the world about us. For never until the Negro’s knowledge of nitrates and engineering, of chemistry and agriculture, of history, science and business is on a level, at least, with that of the whites, will the Negro be able to measure arms successfully with them.