It seems to me that, when the whole world is expanding and thrilling with new life all around us, it is an intolerable mistake not to bring the minds of boys in touch with the modern spirit.  The history of Greece and Rome may well form a part of modern education; but we want rather to bring the minds of those who are being educated into contact with the Greek and Roman spirit, as part of the spirit of the world, than to make them acquainted with the philological and syntactical peculiarities of the two languages.  It may be said that we cannot come into contact with the Greek and the Roman spirit except through reading their respective literatures; but if that is the case, how can a system of teaching classics be defended which never brings the vast majority of the boys, who endure it, in contact with the literature or the national spirit of the Greeks and Romans at all?  I do not think that classical teachers can sincerely maintain that the average product of a classical school has any real insight into, or familiarity with, either the language or the spirit of these two great nations.

And if that is true of average boys educated on this system, what is it that classical teachers profess to have given them?  They will say grip, vigour, the fortified mind.  But where is the proof of it?  If I saw classically educated boys flinging themselves afterwards with energy and ardour into modern literature, history, philosophy, science, I should be the first to concur in the value of the system.  But I see, instead, intellectual cynicism, intellectual apathy, an absorbing love of physical exercise, an appetite for material pleasures, a distaste for books and thought.  I do not say that these tendencies would at once yield to a simpler and more enlightened system of education; but the results of the present system seem to me so negative, so unsatisfactory, as to justify, and indeed necessitate, the trying of educational experiments.  It is terrible to see the patient acquiescence, the humble conscientiousness with which the present system is administered.  It is pathetic to see so much labour expended upon an impossible task.  There is something, of course, morally impressive about the courage and loyalty of those who stick to a sinking ship, and attempt to bale out with teacups the inrush of the overwhelming tide.  But one cannot help feeling that too much is at stake; that year by year the younger generation, which ought to be sent out alive to intellectual interests of every kind, in a period which is palpitating with problems and thrilled by wonderful surprises, is being starved and cramped by an obstinate clinging to an old tradition, to a system which reveals its inadequacy to all who pass by; or, rather, our boys are being sacrificed to a weak compromise between two systems, the old and the new, which are struggling together.  The new system cannot at present eject the old, and the old can only render the new futile without exercising its own complete influence.