We shall, then, make a long step forward when we determine that in the college, as distinguished from the university, it is better to have the great mass of men, whatever may be the waste in a few unmalleable minds, go through the discipline of a single group of studies—­with, of course, a considerable freedom of choice in the outlying field.  And it will probably appear in experience that the only practicable group to select is the classics, with the accompaniment of philosophy and the mathematical sciences.  Latin and Greek are, at least, as disciplinary as any other subjects; and if it can be further shown that they possess a specific power of correction for the more disintegrating tendencies of the age, it ought to be clear that their value as instruments of education outweighs the service of certain other studies which may seem to be more immediately utilitarian.

For it will be pretty generally agreed that efficiency of the individual scholar and unity of the scholarly class are, properly, only the means to obtain the real end of education, which is social efficiency.  The only way, in fact, to make the discipline demanded by a severe curriculum and the sacrifice of particular tastes required for unity seem worth the cost, is to persuade men that the resulting form of education both meets a present and serious need of society and promises to serve those individuals who desire to obtain society’s fairer honors.  As for the specific need of society at the present day, it is not my purpose to open this matter now, for the good reason that the editor of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW has already permitted me to argue it at length in my article on Natural Aristocracy.  Mr. McCombs, speaking for the “practical” man, declares that there is no place in politics for the intellectual aristocrat.  A good many of us believe that unless the very reverse of this is true, unless the educated man can somehow, by virtue of his education, make of himself a governor of the people in the larger sense, and even to some extent in the narrow political sense, unless the college can produce a hierarchy of character and intelligence which shall in due measure perform the office of the discredited oligarchy of birth, we had better make haste to divert our enormous collegiate endowments into more useful channels.

And here I am glad to find confirmation of my belief in the stalwart old Boke Named the Governour, published by Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531, the first treatise on education in the English tongue, and still, after all these years, one of the wisest.  It is no waste of time to take account of the theory held by the humanists when study at Oxford and Cambridge was shaping itself for its long service in giving to the oligarchic government of Great Britain whatever elements it possessed of true aristocracy.  Elyot’s book is equally a treatise on the education of a gentleman, and on the ordinance of government; for, as he says elsewhere, he wrote “to instruct men in such virtues as shall be expedient for them which shall have authority in a weal public.”  I quote from various parts of his work with some abridgment, retaining the quaint spelling of the original, and I beg the reader not to skip, however long the citation may appear: