Here, whatever else may be lacking, is discipline.  The sheer difficulty of Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one’s self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the brain.  And it is a demonstrable fact that students of the classics do actually surpass their unclassical rivals in any field where a fair test can be made.  At Princeton, for instance, Professor West has shown this superiority by tables of achievements and grades, which he published in the Educational Review for March, 1913; and a number of letters from various parts of the country, printed in the Nation, tell the same story in striking fashion.  Thus, a letter from Wesleyan (September 7, 1911) gives statistics to prove that the classical students in that university outstrip the others in obtaining all sorts of honors, commonly even honors in the sciences.  Another letter (May 8, 1913) shows that in the first semester in English at the University of Nebraska the percentage of delinquents among those who entered with four years of Latin was below 7; among those who had three years of Latin and one or two of a modern language the percentage rose to 15; two years of Latin and two years of a modern language, 30 per cent.; one year or less of Latin and from two to four years of a modern language, 35 per cent.  And in the Nation of April 23, 1914, Prof.  Arthur Gordon Webster, the eminent physicist of Clark University, after speaking of the late B.O.  Peirce’s early drill and life-long interest in Greek and Latin, adds these significant words:  “Many of us still believe that such a training makes the best possible foundation for a scientist.”  There is reason to think that this opinion is daily gaining ground among those who are zealous that the prestige of science should be maintained by men of the best calibre.

The disagreement in this matter would no doubt be less, were it not for an ambiguity in the meaning of the word “efficient” itself.  There is a kind of efficiency in managing men, and there also is an intellectual efficiency, properly speaking, which is quite a different faculty.  The former is more likely to be found in the successful engineer or business man than in the scholar of secluded habits, and because often such men of affairs received no discipline at college in the classics, the argument runs that utilitarian studies are as disciplinary as the humanistic.  But efficiency of this kind is not an academic product at all, and is commonly developed, and should be developed, in the school of the world.  It comes from dealing with men in matters of large physical moment, and may exist with a mind utterly undisciplined in the stricter sense of the word.  We have had more than one illustrious example in recent years of men capable of dominating their fellows, let us say in financial transactions, who yet, in the grasp of first principles and in the analysis of consequences, have shown themselves to be as inefficient as children.