In the lovely valley at our feet each man sits beneath his vine and fig-tree, singing the songs of peace to all his neighbors. No clanging of weapons or bray of trumpets disturbs the truly celestial calm, and as we watch from Assisi's ramparts no sound comes to our ears harsher than the distant song of peasants returning from the fields or the great white cattle lowing as they think of their master's crib; while the setting sun fills all the west with gold-dust, and throws around Perugia's towers, which no longer threaten, a purple halo of celestial glory. As we look round us upon the matchless prospect it seems as if the reign of Saturn had returned again, and that war and hate had fled before the white-winged doves of peace.

Little Rock, Arkansas.

G. B. ROSE.

THE ACADEMIC IDEAL OF EDUCATION IN ITS

LARGER RELATIONS TO LIFE

The urgent competitive spirit of our times has swept everyong before it in the commercial world and is now seeking for

conquests in the realm of higher education. Until recent Yours the almost universal theory of education in all the univerand colleges of America and Europe has been what I shall "The Academic." The aim of this theory, "the academic," enlarge one's intellectual capacities and interests, to give ss and richness to life, catholicity to vision, and supremely read chasten that subtle and evasive mystery which we namonality. The important factors in this theory of edu

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cation and n langua uage of

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e great literatures of the world, languages, ancient especially the two ancient languages, Greek the lity and perfection of form, and Latin the langand compression-discursive history, philosophy tics.

This con p' of education has held exclusive supremacy in the scholastic institutions of the world through all the sweep of academic history, and if conceptions, so far as their operableness and adequacy to great issues are concerned, are to be measured and estimated by their fruits, then beyond question this ideal has been amply vindicated by the civilization it has accomplished. It is a civilization illustrious among the civilizations of history, for its large diffusion of light, its wide extension of the forces of liberty and democracy, its mastery of the energies and laws of the outer world, its exquisite poetic sensitiveness to the spirit of nature; for its growing objectivity of life and consciousness, and, above all, for the magisterial men of thought and action it has given to the world.

Over against this large free ideal of learning which has for centuries done such noble service in building up man into an ever increasing fullness and symmetry of life, we find placed, in these latter days, a new ideal, the ideal of utility — an ideal, by the way, altogether hypothetical as to its power of accomplishment, for it has not yet been sufficiently subjected to the criti

cal and discriminating touch of time. Our very practical age wants immediacy of results in learning as in commerce. It desiderates not so much culture of the whole man, not so much compass of vision and refinement of manners, as a certain pertinency and expertness of intellect that shall be convertible as swiftly as possible into professional or commercial efficiency. Its sovereign aim is not to produce a man, notable for the comprehension and exactness of his thought, the chastity and delicacy of his tastes, the poise and serenity of his temper, the grace and the chivalry of his canons of conduct; its sovereign aim rather is to produce an efficient industrial unit, a unit that has the largest money earning power, as the president of a modern university, an historian, a linguist, a doctor, a lawyer or a civil engineer. Hence the necessity of a change in educational methods, hence the emphasis upon the modern rather than upon the ancient languages, upon German that pays rather than upon Greek that chastens, hence the accent upon the practical sciences, hence the stress upon a curriculum that consummates itself in the "narrow and limited expert," rather than upon a curriculum that consummates itself in the culture of the whole man, in dignity, power, impressiveness and a beauty of personality.

As one estimating from an outside point of view with a dispassionate and detached mind, the relative values of these competing ideals of higher learning, I desire to give some reasons for the faith that is in me, the faith that for richness and permanency of results the academic ideal with its antique notes of proportion, universality and grace is vastly the superior of the "ideal of utility" with its modern notes of expertness, excessive specialization and immediate economic efficiency.

The old style of education, brings the mind, through the Greek and Latin languages, into a discursive view of two great peoples, distinguished among all the peoples of antiquity by their wealth and fertility of thought and their power of achievement, two peoples immensely rich in literatures at once varied, informative and elevating. It brings the mind also into subjection by the austere, disciplinary educational instrumentalities of logic, metaphysics and pure mathematics. This old style, the academic ideal of education, is the one most certain way to intellectual

power and beauty, to power of intellect subdued and humanized by sensitiveness to the beautiful, to beauty of intellect, commanding and alluring because it is instinct with energy. The element of intellectual power is the natural equation of the discipline in the study of mathematics, logic and metaphysics and the element of intellectual beauty is the natural equation of contact with the great spirits of antiquity, with Ovid, Vergil, Cicero, Horace and Seneca, with Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Homer and Theocritus, the monarchs of the world of mind who have taught all succeeding ages not only how to think, but how to utter thought in great masses of wisdom or in lightest particles of epigram and yet always with perfect loveliness of form.

Now, of course, in any estimate of competing educational methods we must make allowance for the margin of the abnormal, for the personal equation in the matter of intellect, as we do in other matters. Intellectual genius both in the sphere of thought and of its expression is now and then wholly independent of all scholastic methods and is explicable only on the assumption of a divine caprice. This is certainly the case with such transcendant forces in the world of letters as Shakespeare, Bunyan, Boehme and Whitman. These planetary minds self-tutored and self-formed are glorious accidents. But, after making due allowance for these rare exceptions, it may be justly affirmed as a general fact that the men who have made history, who have swayed nations by their eloquence, who have determined by their political prescience and by the mandatoriness of their wills the destinies of nations, who have made ages memorable for their intellectual fecundity and literary splendor, who have written the books, evolved the philosophies, formulated the laws, and sung the epics, odes and lyrics that constitute the glory of every great nation's heritage are largely the product of the academic ideal of education. "The men of light and leading" in the political, professional and literary world of the United Kingdom are almost as a body the output of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Dublin. All of these institutions are inspired by the academic ideal in its primitive purity and all of them are alien in tradition and temper to the theory of utilty in the higher education. Out of the great universities in successive ages have

emerged men who have attained celebrity in all departments of the intellectual life, scientists who have revolutionized their various specialties, geology, physics, chemistry, philology and biology; classicists who have attained world distinction, metaphysicians of eminence and essayists at whose feet we all gladly sit that we may learn to speak and write our mother tongue with force of diction and felicity of phrase. William Pitt, Sir Robert Peel, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Lord Salisbury and Gladstone, among orators and statesmen; Jeremy Taylor, Frederick Robertson, Canon Liddon, Pusey, Maurice and Kingsley, among divines; Hume, Gibbon, Grote, Macaulay, Froude, Lecky, among historians; Addison, Swift, Julius Hare, John Morley, Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Jowett, and Walter Pater, among men of letters - these are all men of the old style of education, men who were nourished in their youth and early manhood on the graces of the classics, on the literary traditions of the past, on the austerities of logic and mathematics. These men, and a host of others that might be mentioned, have spoken or written themselves into immortality. They have given to the world orations powerful in logic and stately in construction, they have given to the world works of imagination or criticism, essays, philosophical dissertations, and poems of great power and imperishable loveliness. And what is true of the United Kingdom is likewise, though less conspicuously, true, of our own land. I say less conspicuously true for the physical has so obtruded itself in our national consciousness, it has been so dominant in our notions of well-being, so monopolizing in its demands upon our talents, that the achievements of the mind and the nobler elements of personal force do not stand out so clearly in our biographical literature as they do in the biographical literature of the United Kingdom. Yet even here I think it may be said with perfect justice to the fact, that all that is most admirable in our national life, whether we regard the accomplishment of statesmanship or the accomplishment of letters, bears upon it the mark of the old style, the impress on its utterance and manner of the classical habit of thought. Indeed I am not aware of a single exponent of the theory of specialization and utility in