LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. \ 
 
 Class 
 
I 
 
 WITH AN APPENDIX 
 
 CONTAINING A LIST OP FIVE HUN- 
 DRED BEST BOOKS 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES WILLIAM SUPER, Ph.D., LL.D. 
 
 EX-PRESIDENT OP THE OHIO UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSOR OF GREEK IBIDEM 
 
 TRANSLATOR OF WEIL'S ORDER OF WORD, SATJTHOR OF A HISTORY 
 
 OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, BETWEEN HEATHENISM AND 
 
 CHRISTIANITY, WISDOM AND WILL IN EDUCATION, 
 
 AND NUMEROUS MONOGRAPHS ON EDUCATIONAL, 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL 
 
 SUBJECTS 
 
 1907 
 C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER 
 
 SYRACUSE, N. Y. 
 
To THE YOUNG PEOPLE 
 
 who graduated from the Ohio University in the 
 
 years 1884, '85, '86, '87, '88, '89, '90, '91, 
 
 '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '99, 1900, 
 
 '01, this booklet is inscribed 
 
 reminiscently, exhortatively, 
 
 affectionately, by the 
 
 AUTHOR. 
 
"A little learning is a dang'rous thing; 
 Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring; 
 There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, 
 And drinking largely sobers us again." Pope. 
 
 " If any man shall convince me and show me 
 that I do not think or act aright, I will gladly 
 change ; for I seek the truth from which no one 
 ever suffered injury. But he is injured who abides 
 in his error and ignorance." Marcus Aurelius An- 
 toninus. 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 It is the fashion with the heads of our colleges 
 and universities to seek to attract students by set- 
 ting forth the pecuniary advantages to be gained 
 by what is called a liberal education. They 
 maintain that four or more years spent in acquiring 
 the best systematic education possible are not only 
 no loss from a pecuniary point of view, but 
 a positive gain rather, since the rapidity of subse- 
 quent advancement will more than make up for the 
 apparent waste of time. 
 
 Thoroughly convinced as I am of the advantages 
 of a liberal education, no matter how or where 
 obtained, I am fully persuaded that the position 
 above referred to can not be sustained. I am con- 
 fident if a young man's highest ambition is to get 
 rich, he does not need even the systematic educa- 
 tion to be got by passing through a good High 
 School. 
 
 The error arises from a failure to distinguish be- 
 tween information and education or enlightenment; 
 between knowledge and culture; between alertness 
 of mind or keenness of intellect and breadth of 
 understanding. One can not acquire an education 
 
10 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 without a knowledge of books; but the knowledge 
 of what man has done and thought, in a large way 
 and on great problems, is of little use to him who 
 is concerned only how to use the passing oppoi - 
 tunity to serve himself. 
 
 In order to gain wealth one needs to know what 
 is going on in that particular domain of the business 
 world in which his pecuniary interests are supposed 
 to lie, and very little else. One needs only to know 
 how to take advantage of opportunities for profit 
 as they arise; nothing further. Some of our wealth- 
 iest men have not knowledge enough to use their 
 mother-tongue correctly, yet their wealth gives ^them 
 a temporary influence and a certain though passing 
 importance. Were it not for their wealth they 
 would be nobodies. In such cases money is the 
 man's master and the first consideration when his 
 name is mentioned. Money makes the man, gives 
 him a kind of dignity, secures for him a measure of 
 outward respect, but it can not give him worth. 
 
 On the other hand, the primary object of a liberal 
 education is to impart to a man a value aside, from 
 any tangible possessions he may have succeed ed^in 
 getting into his hands and his coffers. 
 
II 
 
 An interview with the late Senator Hoar has 
 been widely circulated in which he is reported to 
 have said that his annual income outside of his sal- 
 ary never exceeded two thousand dollars. Yet his 
 character stood so high, and so implicit was the 
 confidence his constituents placed in his ability and 
 integrity, that for almost thirty years he was a rep- 
 resentative in Congress of the most enlightened com- 
 monwealth in the Union. When first sent to Wash- 
 ington it was through no effort of his own,and his sub- 
 sequent re-elections came to him unsought. During 
 his entire career he was more or less identified with 
 almost every important measure that came before 
 the body of which he was a member. While others 
 with far less ability used their opportnnities for ac- 
 quiring wealth he sought only to cultivate his own 
 mind and to serve his country most efficiently. 
 That young man who would not rather be the 
 counterpart of the late George Frisbie Hoar than any 
 one or any ten of the intellectual nobodies who have 
 bought their way to political honors, is sadly in need 
 of a change of heart. 
 
 The State of New York never gave birth to a more 
 distinguished citizen than De Witt Clinton, nor to 
 
 11 
 
12 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 one more disinterested. "He was a great statesman 
 in his time, not for money (as they are now) but for 
 the people's good. Millions had been within his 
 grasp while Governor, yet the day after his remains 
 had been consigned to the tomb a set of silver-ware 
 presented to him by the Chamber of Commerce of 
 New York as a token of esteem, had to be sold to 
 liquidate a debt of eight hundred dollars." While 
 Mr. Clinton may have been rather inexcusably in- 
 different to his private interests, his poverty is far 
 more to his credit than if he had erred on the other 
 side and looked out for himself first. 
 
 I do not belong to the class who condemn riches 
 unconditionally; w r ho are/eady to declare that every 
 rich man is a rogue or a hard-hearted brute. I can 
 not deny that our country and every country owes 
 much to its rich men and that riches are often hon- 
 estly gained. But this is the result of shrewdness 
 and intellectual acumen or good luck and not of 
 education. If a wealthy man is liberally educated 
 and enlightened it is a matter of great good fortune 
 to himself and a blessing to the community of which 
 he forms a part; but the two things have no neces- 
 sary connection with each other. 
 
III. 
 
 It is a common mistake to suppose that a liberal 
 education can be acquired at any institution of 
 learning however well equipped it may be with the 
 means and appliances of instruction. The best 
 schools, the most eminent teachers, are but guide- 
 posts, or means to an end. They can show us how 
 to lay the foundations of knowledge and where to 
 find the elements of culture; there their power ends. 
 The most valuable acquisitions, indeed the only 
 acquisitions that possess any genuine worth, are 
 those we make for ourselves. 
 
 Let us remember that the great men and the 
 great women of the world have learned only the 
 rudiments from others and that with these their 
 education by living teachers ended. A young per- 
 son can lay the foundations of knowledge at high 
 school, college or university, can lay them broad 
 and deep and firm; but the superstructure must be 
 erected in after life. 
 
 The best education obtained at the best school is, 
 speaking by and large, to a greater or less extent, 
 of an artificial character. In the realm of mind it 
 deals with what is more or less remote; in the realm 
 of matter, with forces and conditions in miniature. 
 
 13 
 
14 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 In actual life the individual has constantly to face 
 conditions that did not exist quite in the same re- 
 lation before and has to adapt himself to them or 
 make them subservient to him. 
 
 No man was ever made a great teacher by any- 
 body else. It is in the right use of conditions that 
 the successful man differs from those who are to be 
 classed with the failures. Neither was any one ever 
 made a great commander by a military school; yet 
 military schools have proved their usefulness to 
 such an extent that all civilized countries have 
 them. As long as nations shall continue to adjust 
 their disputes by a resort to force instead of by an 
 appeal to reason, institutions that teach the art and 
 science of killing men and rendering human labor 
 useless will continue to find favor with governments. 
 
 There is always danger that formal education, 
 that all education conducted according to a pre- 
 conceived plan, will become stereotyped. It is 
 natural for men to suppose when they have for a 
 long time done certain things in a certain way that 
 their way is the best; it is without question the 
 easiest. They are more concerned about regularity 
 than results. When the young Napoleon first ap- 
 peared on the field of war he was generally opposed 
 by men who fought battles and expected to win 
 them as they had been accustomed to doing. Not 
 so he; what he aimed at was victories; to gain these 
 he threw all the rules of war to the winds. What 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 15 
 
 he had learned at Brienne and Paris stood him in 
 good stead, but the conditions of actual warfare 
 taught him new lessons every day: that he knew 
 how to use these lessons to his own advantage was 
 what distinguished him from all the commanders 
 of his time. 
 
 On the other hand, one of his successful oppo- 
 nents, Bluecher, was a man almost wholly without 
 education. If we were to take his case as typical 
 and as a rule to follow, not only are military schools 
 but all other schools of little use. The same 
 statement may be applied to many successful men 
 in every walk of life. 
 
IV. 
 
 The right kind of an education must fit a man 
 for the comprehension and interpretation of the 
 phenomena of the outer as well as of the inner 
 world. Introspection is often no more than a brood- 
 ing over our own mental states and may easily be- 
 come morbid. The study of our own mind is 
 fruitful only when it is made the basis of compari- 
 son with other minds. Emerson says that a life of 
 solitude is fit only for a god or a beast. 
 * We need above all things to have our intellectual 
 pewers trained to the observation of the relation of 
 cause to effect, whether it be in the study of the past 
 or of the present. Nothing else will have so help- 
 ful and healthful an influence upon our conduct. 
 The daily acts of our lives, unless we have degene- 
 rated into mere creatures of routine or have never 
 risen above it, are hardly more than the perpetual 
 adjustment of means to ends, a continual calcula- 
 tion of probabilities. If we have provided ourselves 
 with such a fund of human experince as will enable 
 us to choose that course which is beset with the 
 fewest chances of failure we have done all that it is 
 possible for our limited powers to accomplish. 
 While it contributes much to intellectual enlight- 
 
 16 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 17 
 
 ment to travel, to know other men end other man- 
 ners, other climes and other conditions, this insight 
 can be gained only by those who have been trained 
 to observe, to compare, to reflect, and to interpret. 
 As Seneca said long ago, whithersoever we travel, 
 we take ourselves along; we can not help making our- 
 selves a sort of measuring line which we apply to 
 all that we see and hear. If then we do not know 
 how to use it, or if it is incorrect, our estimate is 
 always erroneous. 
 
 In this respect modern education differs from all 
 that has preceded it. It lays much stress on the 
 careful abservation and accurate determination of 
 external phenomena. Apart from a comparatively 
 small number of choice spirits, the ancient Greeks 
 did not greatly concern themselves with anything 
 but man, and only man of the highest type. After 
 they became self-conscious and began to view man 
 apart from eternal nature and to separate the in- 
 dividual from the mass, they were filled with won- 
 der at all the phenomena that came under their 
 eyes. For more than a century the results of their 
 observations kept accumulating. This was the 
 golden age of the Hellenes. 
 
 Then, as they fell more and more under foreign 
 domination the keenness of the Greek intellect be- 
 gan to grow dull. The Alexandrian age was still 
 in a large measure Hellenic, but as time passed it 
 became more and more mixed with foreign elements. 
 
18 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 For a while knowledge was increased though in- 
 tellectual power was on the wane. As men came 
 to know more they reflected less and pondered less 
 deeply. They still preserved an interest in the 
 plastic arts, but they no longer had a keen appre- 
 ciation of the genuinely artistic. 
 
 In the oration which Dio Chrysostum delivered 
 before the Rhodians he reproaches his hearers for 
 the vicious custom of changing the inscriptions on 
 old statues in order to honor or flatter contempora- 
 ries. Those who wrote or spoke did not concern 
 themselves to tell anything new; they merely 
 endeavored to treat old and well worn topics in a 
 new way. He who could use the largest number of 
 words in discussing the most trifling theme was 
 most admired. The Greeks were still as curious as 
 ever; but theirs was the curiosity of children, not 
 the spirit of inquiry that animates and inspires the 
 scientific investigator. Many new books were 
 written, but they were in a great measure compila- 
 tions from older ones. Hence it is not without 
 justification that most histories of Greece and Greek 
 literature end with the career of Alexander. 
 
VI. 
 
 With the rise and spread of Christianity men 
 more and more lost interest in external nature and 
 in what we may call the natural man. Political 
 conditions for the common people kept going from 
 bad to worse. All their efforts were needed to gain 
 a bare livelihood; they had no time left to think of 
 intellectual culture or to seek it. God only could 
 help the common man; God alone could free him 
 from his own sinful self and save him after he had 
 quitted this sorrowful world. 
 
 Since there was little hope of making the world 
 better, the devout could attain perfection only by 
 having as little to do with it as possible, or what 
 was still better, by retiring from it entirely. The 
 spirit of asceticism drove many of the most capable 
 men into solitude. Thus for nearly a thousand 
 years everything that bore the semblance of educa- 
 tion was more or less pervaded with the spirit of 
 devotion, with exhortation to heart-searching, to 
 meditation and prayer. 
 
 Until within comparatively recent times and in 
 every country of Europe the most widely read books 
 were devotional manuals. These books were conned 
 by millions who read nothing else. It may seem 
 
 19 
 
20 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 strange that the doctrines and teachings of the first 
 Christian writers could be so perverted and mis- 
 understood; but the fact shows to what an extent 
 objective conditions determine subjective mental 
 states. 
 
 The modern tendency in education is therefore a 
 healthful tendency in so far as it teaches the young 
 to look about themselves as well as within; to look 
 forward as well as to look back. It teaches them 
 the power of man over external nature; that human 
 welfare is to a great extent conditioned upon the 
 use he makes of this power. It teaches them not 
 to run away from evil but face it boldly, to fight it 
 and destroy it. 
 
 The chief danger is that this tendency may be 
 allowed to carry us too far and we come to believe 
 after a while that the highest aim in life is to ac- 
 quire the largest quantity of earthly possessions. 
 The immense aggregate of human experience that 
 a young man, even during his minority, can absorb 
 from books ought not only to make him better in- 
 formed but also better able to regulate his conduct 
 in harmony with the moral order of the world. 
 Yea, it ought to do more: it ought to fill him with 
 the determination to sacrifice everything rather than 
 do violence to this order. 
 
VII. 
 
 It is well to keep in mind that knowledge pure 
 and simple is generally useful, or may at least in 
 almost all cases be turned to advantage. There 
 is an education that can not be called liberal but 
 which is nevertheless in the highest sense profitable. 
 Darwin had not the slightest interest in works of 
 the imagination, yet he did more to stimulate 
 thought than any other man of his day. The pro- 
 jectors of the great engineering works which fill the 
 beholder with awe as much as the wonders of na- 
 ture, may have absolutely no taste for anything 
 that does not directly concern their business; yet 
 they and their class have contributed and will con- 
 tinue to contribute to the happiness and welfare of 
 men. 
 
 We do not wisely when we depreciate one man 
 because he is not another or censure him for not 
 doing one thing when he feels that he can do some- 
 thing else better. Most men are good for some- 
 thing, and blessed is the man who has found his 
 vocation. I may quote here with approval a homely 
 illustration of this truth that I once heard. "I do 
 not find fault with one thing because it is not another. 
 I do not blame a cow for not laying eggs or a hen 
 for not giving milk. Everything in nature has its 
 use, but we should take heed that it is not abused." 
 
 31 
 
VIII. 
 
 The biographical data brought together in " Who's 
 Who in America" have frequently been cited to prove 
 that a collegiate education is an important aid to 
 success in life. The book contains a brief sketch of 
 about fourteen thousand five hundred persons. Of 
 this number seventy per cent have had the advan- 
 tages of what is called a higher education. Whether 
 the persons whose names are recorded are to be 
 considered the successful men and women of our 
 day depends entirely upon the definition one gives 
 to success. Some very rich men are represented in 
 the volume, but a far larger number known to be 
 equally wealthy are omitted. Besides, it may be 
 that the thirty per cent who had only meager edu- 
 cotional advantages have larger possessions and 
 wield greater influence of a certain sort than the 
 remaining seventy per cent. 
 
 On the other hand the men and women whose 
 names appear in the volume may justly be regarded 
 as representing the higher thought of the nation. 
 Nearly all of them have written books or are in one 
 way or another creators and disseminators of ideas 
 that are more or less above the commonplace. But 
 we look in vain for the names of scores and hun- 
 dreds of rich men with which the press has made 
 us familiar. The book is therefore evidence that a 
 
 22 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 23 
 
 person who has had a systematic education is much 
 more likely to make a mark, however brief its dur- 
 ation, in the world, than one who has not; but it 
 affords no proof and furnishes little evidence that it 
 contributes materially to worldly success. 
 
 If we except a score or two of names whose pos- 
 sessors have become wealthy through fortunate in- 
 vestments or by inheritance and who have also 
 literary tastes, it is probable that "Who's Who" 
 represents but a very small part of the material 
 resources of the country in private hands. We 
 should also remember that it contains the names of 
 the members of Congress. These men, as a rule, 
 certainly do not stand for success in any exalted 
 sense of the term; for it is well known that the mere 
 fact of election signifies nothing and that the legis- 
 lation of the country is chiefly managed by a very 
 small part of the entire body of lawmakers. 
 
 It is far better to take the evidence of these sta- 
 tistics for just what they are worth and to refrain 
 from giving them a value that is in great measure 
 supposititious. They demonstrate that the young 
 men and women who wish to count for something 
 more than the millions that are content to live their 
 little day and be forgotten; who place the highest 
 value upon "things of the mind" rather than upon 
 things of the body; and who are concerned about 
 those treasures that perish not in the using, will be 
 greatly profited if they start in life with a syste- 
 matic education. 
 
IX. 
 
 An education may be liberal, as the phrase goes, 
 yet fail to have a liberalizing effect upon its posses- 
 sor. Above all things it must be a life process, 
 which unfortunately too often it is not. Socrates 
 and Plato and Aristotle insisted on this more than 
 two millenniums ago. 
 
 It is to be regretted that the great majority of 
 those who have enjoyed the best educational advan- 
 tages in early life reach the limits of their intellect- 
 ual and moral development about the time they 
 have attained their physical growth. They increase 
 in knowledge and experience but their education 
 comes to a stand-still. Saint Paul exhorted the 
 brethren to strive to attain "unto the measure of the 
 stature of the fullness of Christ", not because he 
 thought complete attainment was possible but be- 
 cause striving meant wholesome discipline. In like 
 manner it behooves those who desire earnestly to 
 gain the full measure of educational enlightment 
 and refinement never to cease in their endeavors 
 after largeness of intellectual vision, and complete 
 freedom from preconceived opinions. 
 
 There is no rest for the seeker after truth, but this 
 unrest is the most glorious attribute of man. The 
 
 24 
 
A LIBEKAL EDUCATION 25 
 
 power to grasp comprehensively the psychic forces 
 that are about us and to control our inner impulses 
 is within the reach of every one, though not with an 
 equal expenditure of effort or at the same period of 
 life. In early years the impulses are comparatively 
 strong and the regulative faculty relatively feeble. 
 The child can not govern itself except under con- 
 straint or persuasion. Ere long however it begins 
 to see the wisdom of using the will wisely. But the 
 time never comes to any of us when we can safely 
 release ourselves from the control of the will. There 
 is much truth in the saying that men are but chil- 
 dren of a larger growth. When they can no longer 
 have teachers they ought courageously to assume 
 the duty of teaching themselves. 
 
X. 
 
 As the primary and indeed the only object of a 
 liberal education should be a noble life, the man 
 who has been thus educated will not be one thing 
 while professing to be something else; he will not 
 seek to gain a point by understatement or casuistry; 
 he will be fearless in the maintenance of the right 
 and in the defense of the truth because he knows 
 better than anybody else that the truth will ulti- 
 mately prevail. His life will be regulated upon the 
 principle that it is better to be faithful than famous; 
 honest, than to gain the title of " honorable." 
 
 Goethe says, "Let a man be noble, helpful and 
 good, for this alone distinguishes him from all the 
 beings we know." The community does not demand 
 anything of the liberally educated man that it has 
 not a perfect right to ask of every citizen; but it 
 rightfully expects more. The moral virtues know 
 no distinction of class. But the liberally educated 
 man ought to represent the acme of excellence; he 
 ought in a large measure to be a model for those 
 who are less fortunate in their mental make-up; his 
 influence ought always to be elevating for those 
 who come under it. 
 
 Says Coleridge: "To carry on the feelings of 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 27 
 
 childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine 
 the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the 
 appearances which every day, for perhaps forty 
 years, had rendered familiar; this is the character 
 and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which 
 distinguish genius from talent." It is the high 
 prerogative of an inquistive mind never to grow old. 
 "The used key is always bright," says Poor Richard. 
 Flowing water never becomes putrid. 
 
 Every one can readily recall the names of not a 
 few men now living or recently deceased who pre- 
 served their intellectual vigor almost or quite un- 
 impaired up to four score and beyond. Every event 
 in the most uneventful life may be viewed from a 
 different angle since the observer is never the same 
 two days in succession. He is, compared with him- 
 self, like the different spectators looking upon a 
 rainbow, it is not the same to any two. Nor 
 is this the sole privilege of genius or even of 
 talent of a high order ; it may be shared 
 by all. It is a brotherhood into which any one 
 may be initiated who is willing to make the 
 necessary preparation and go through the requisite 
 ceremonies. 
 
 Genius is spontaneous. It reaches results and 
 forms conclusions without knowing how and with- 
 out being able to render a reason. It is therefore 
 not an absurd supposition that the diligent searcher 
 after new truth receives more pleasure from his 
 
28 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 quest than genius, since, to use a homely phrase, 
 he "has to earn what he gets." 
 
 The mere laborer, the hewer of wood and drawer 
 of water, though an important part of every state, 
 has usually enough to do and often more than 
 enough, to keep himself from straying out of the 
 straight and narrow path of rectitude, but the liber- 
 ally educated man not only ought to be able to hold 
 himself well in hand, he ought to be able also to 
 help others. He ought to act habitually according 
 to the maxim, " Do unto others as if you were the 
 others." According to Roman Catholic theology, 
 some persons are capable of performing works of 
 supererogation, that is, more good works than God 
 requires or are necessary to their own salvation. 
 In like manner the liberally educated man should 
 always be ready to do works of supererogation in a 
 moral and intellectual sense. He ought at all 
 times and in all places to stand for that influence 
 which Swift, and Matthew Arnold after him, calls 
 " sweetness and light ". 
 
 This immense association to which we must belong 
 whether we will or no, called society, needs intelli- 
 gent leaders, men who have the lessons of the past 
 well in hand and who know how to use them for 
 future guidance. Surely, there is no sadder specta- 
 cle in this world than men and women, whether 
 well or ill informed, whose sole object in life is 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 29 
 
 money or sensuous gratification. If such persons 
 have been created in the image and likeness of God, 
 they have fallen far from their first estate. 
 
XI 
 
 Whatever be the factors that enter into a liberal 
 education, there are two and perhaps only two that 
 are essential and indispensable, assuming that a 
 foundation has been laid in a knowledge of the 
 branches taught in all colleges and reputable high 
 schools. These two factors are represented by his- 
 tory and literature. History sets before us what 
 men have done. It exhibits to us in the most ef- 
 fective way how much sorrow has been brought 
 upon the world by deceit, by ill-advised ambition, 
 by lack of principle and of sympathy in rulers and 
 ruled, by a willingness to sacrifice everything and 
 everybody on the altar of selfishness, preferring im- 
 mediate gains to the benefits that come to men and 
 to their decendants who regulate their conduct both 
 private and public by the unvarying rules of recti- 
 tude. It teaches the inevitable results of a disre- 
 gard of the fundamental principles of all social and 
 civic life, a principle that all men recognize and ac- 
 knowledge in theory, but which they too often ig- 
 nore or disregard in practice, namely justice.* 
 
 * "While of all studies in the whole range of knowledge the 
 study of law affords the most conservative training, so the study 
 of modern history is, next to theology itself, and only next in so 
 
 30 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 31 
 
 In order to study history profitably it is not nec- 
 essary to begin at the beginning, though it is 
 best to do so, for the lesson is always the same. 
 We should begin with the history of Greece because 
 it records the efforts of the most highly endowed 
 people that have dwelt upon the earth to solve the 
 same problems, or at least many of them, that still 
 engage the attention of the civilized world. His- 
 tory teaches us that there is no short cut to reforms 
 that all right-minded people advocate and that the 
 social systems of our day are the result of a gradual 
 psychic evolution. 
 
 Moreover, a thorough course of training in an- 
 cient Greek history is not so huge a task as one 
 might suppose who is not conversant with the con- 
 ditions of the problem. Even the great work of 
 Grote can be pretty well mastered in a few years by 
 persons who have many other things to do. Then 
 there are the histories of Curtius or of Holm in four 
 or five volumes, and the excellent one-volume man- 
 ual of Bury, if one does not care to go through the 
 originals from which these works are drawn. 
 
 Roman history is almost equally profitable. The 
 sphere of its action is much larger, though the psy- 
 chic forces that enter into it are less manifold and 
 
 far as theology rests on a devine revelation, the most thoroughly 
 religious training the mind can receive." Stubbs. 
 
 Cicero calls history the witness of the times, the light of truth, 
 the imperishable memory, the teacher of life, the expounder of 
 the past. 
 
32 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 less complex, at least until the decline of the em- 
 pire had fully set in. The problems with which 
 the government had to deal kept growing more and 
 more numerous. They could not be solved by ad- 
 herance to traditional methods and maxims and 
 complete disintegration was the result. 
 
XII 
 
 A study of history, especially of those peoples 
 that may justly be regarded as relatively the most 
 advanced, makes it plain as the sun at noonday, 
 except to the blind, that the preponderance has 
 always been with those nations that possessed the 
 largest number of excellences; though we must not 
 judge any period of the past by the standard of our 
 own times. It is interesting and ought to be profit- 
 able to note how uniformly the leading historians 
 have deduced from their studies the maxim ex- 
 pressed by Schiller that it is the curse of an evil 
 deed that it continues to beget itself. Wrong 
 breeds wrong; injustice engenders injustice. This 
 is the inexorable law of civic life. 
 
 Moral principles are intuitive, but they need to 
 be developed by organized society, by government, 
 or at least under the protection of government. All 
 government must stand for justice ; otherwise it is 
 doomed. Events move slowly ; but like the gla- 
 ciers of geologic time, they are irresistible. The 
 author of the Iliad opens his great drama with an 
 invocation to the epic muse to aid him in fitly set- 
 ting forth the ruinous wrath of Achilles that brought 
 innumerable woes upon the Greeks. But with the 
 
 33 
 
34: A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 characteristic fatalism of his age, he ascribes them 
 to the will of the supreme god. The point to be 
 noticed is that anger, blind and unreasoning im- 
 pulse, is the cause of this multitude of sorrows. In 
 another place, however, this same god is repre- 
 sented as saying that men blame the dwellers on 
 Olympus for their misfortunes when in truth it is 
 their own follies that cause them. 
 
XIII 
 
 At the beginning of his history Herodotus 
 adduces the testimony of the Phoenicians, Greeks, 
 and Persians as to the cause that brought about the 
 hostility between the two latter. Each nation 
 holds the other responsible and itself guiltless. 
 Both admit that the animosity was caused by the 
 infliction of some wrong, some act of injustice for 
 which the blame is to be laid anywhere but at 
 home. Diodorus of Sicily begins his work with a 
 plea for the recognition of the value of history as a 
 guide to conduct. If the counsel of an old man is 
 of more value, in any given case, than that of a 
 youth it is because of his larger experience. For a 
 similar reason the counsel of history is to be more 
 highly prized than that of either because it makes 
 available the experience of many generations. 
 Thomas Fuller, the witty divine and historian, al- 
 most paraphrases these words when he says: " His- 
 tory maketh a young man to be old without either 
 wrinkles or gray hair, privileging him with the 
 experience of age without either the infirmities or 
 the inconveniences thereof." 
 
 Diodorus maintains that history is to be re- 
 garded as the custodian of the nobility of the noble; 
 
 35 
 
36 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 as a witness against the villainy of the vicious and 
 as a benefactress for all time. Seeing that mythol- 
 ogy, which is pure invention, does much to ennoble 
 those who have deserved well of their kind, how 
 much more is to be expected that history, the herald 
 of truth, the mother of philosophy, should promote 
 righteousness in a high degree ! 
 
 Polybius is convinced that the study of history is 
 educational if it gives a clear view of the causes of 
 events. It thus offers to men the opportunity to 
 choose the better policy in any given case, assum- 
 ing of course that he who is to make choice is in 
 position to influence the course of events. Our au- 
 thor accordingly often reminds his readers that his 
 history is in a large measure a demonstration of 
 the truth that the supremacy is always with the 
 best; that it is before everything else a history of 
 deeds, of actions, rather than a record of legends, of 
 myths, and the like, in the study of which he can 
 discover small profit. History becomes a guide to 
 conduct when it shows the comparative results of 
 honorable and dishonorable conduct. 
 
 Sallust opens his history of the Jugurthine war 
 with a sneer at those who attribute their misfor- 
 tunes and their evil deeds to fate. He declares that 
 if man were as eager in the pursuit of what is noble 
 as of what is useless or base, he could control cir- 
 cumstances quite as much as he is controlled by 
 them. 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 37 
 
 Livy tells us in the preface to his great history 
 of Rome, that he has undertaken the heavy task 
 for several reasons, but above everything else be- 
 cause he believes that " This is the great advantage 
 to be derived from the study of history; indeed the 
 only one which can make it answer any profitable 
 and salutary purpose ; for being abundantly fur- 
 nished with clear and distinct examples of every 
 kind of conduct, we may select for ourselves and 
 for the state to which we belong, such as are worthy 
 of imitation, and carefully noting such as being 
 dishonorable in their principles, are equally so in 
 their effects, learn to avoid them." 
 
 In the preface to his Memoirs Count von Beust 
 says: "As the voice of the prophet is a rousing and 
 a warning voice, so would be the voice of the his- 
 torian, if he received more attention than has 
 usually fallen to the lot of prophets." 
 
 It is a belief held by some well informed persons 
 that the lessons of history have no value as a guide 
 under subsequent conditions. Sad mistake! One 
 can not read the works of Plato, of Aristotle and of 
 other thinkers of antiquity without having the con- 
 viction brought home to him to which Jowett gives 
 expression in the words: "How little have we added 
 except what has been gained by the greater experi- 
 ence of history ! " Plutarch wrote a series of 
 biographies and biography is history . by sections 
 for a purely moral purpose. These biographies 
 
38 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 are an endeavor on his part to collect and to set 
 forth the testimony afforded by the conduct of the 
 leading men of the past on the question whether it 
 is ever profitable for a statesman to do wrong or to 
 condone injustice. 
 
XIV. 
 
 History is sometimes spoken of as a department 
 of psychology. It is however not so much a depart- 
 ment of psychology as the resultant of psychic 
 forces operating in the life of peoples and nations. 
 Within the last three quarters of a century it has 
 become in a great measure, a study of the impon- 
 derable forces that have ruled the world. Albeit, 
 now and then, one of the choice spirits of antiquity, 
 one of the seers of bygone civilizations, had a clear 
 perception of this truth. Thucydides sets forth 
 the high prerogative of the historian when he tells 
 his readers that he has written for those who "are 
 desirous to have a true view of what has happened 
 and of the like or similar things which in accord- 
 ance with human nature will probably happen 
 hereafter." He adds that if his readers shall pro- 
 nounce what he has written to be useful he will be 
 satisfied. No wonder that in the consciousness of 
 having honestly striven to set forth the truth he 
 exclaims: "My history is an everlasting possession, 
 not a prize composition which is heard and forgot- 
 ten." He accordingly proceeds to unfold before his 
 readers the painful tragedy that ended in the over- 
 throw of his country. For him, man, and man 
 
 39 
 
40 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 almost exclusively, is the object of interest. He 
 takes little account of physical conditions evidently 
 because he considers these of secondary importance. 
 It is doubtful whether any other book sets forth 
 more clearly and with greater force the demoraliz- 
 ing influence of party spirit; the baneful effects of 
 a policy that seeks only the immediate advantage 
 while utterly ignoring the principles and claims of 
 right and justice. Thucydides' History of the 
 Peloponnesian War is a sad, sad book, and all the 
 more so because of its evident honesty and truth- 
 fulness. 
 
XV. 
 
 There is, of course, a physical and a physiological 
 side to history. National character is to some ex- 
 tent the resultant of soil and climate. But no man 
 who has taken the trouble to penetrate beneath the 
 surface of things will assert that justice and right, 
 liberty and equity, are determined by external 
 conditions, or that these are of such a character 
 anywhere upon the face of the habitable globe as to 
 render the promotion of the moral virtues by the 
 state impossible. Hegel uttered a profound truth 
 when he wrote that the philosophy of history is the 
 philosophy of mind which traces the evolution of 
 reason manifesting itself in the state. I do not be- 
 lieve that a single one of the great historians would 
 have hesitated to subscribe to the doctrine that 
 human history is the record of the gradual triumph 
 of conscience and reason over the animal forces of 
 instinct and temperament in man. "The main 
 progress of mankind lies in the development of the 
 ethical idea, which existing in our nature as a form 
 of mind, an element of human personality, has ever 
 more and more unfolded itself in history as the 
 
 41 
 
42 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 vivifying principle of those ordinances and institu- 
 tions whereby we live as civilized men; as the 
 justification of the common might without which it 
 would be mere brute force." 
 
XVI 
 
 It was the conviction of the late Lord Acton, than 
 whom no more penetrating historian ever put pen 
 to paper, that progress does not consist in a con- 
 stantly deepening insight into the laws of physical 
 nature, but in the profounder conviction of the sac- 
 redness and worth of man as an ethical being en- 
 dowed with volition, choice and responsibility. 
 Blind indeed must be the student of the records of 
 any country, or of the public life of any statesman, 
 who can not see therein "a moral order, a reason, 
 an ideal"; who will not be convinced that it is the 
 privilege of every man, by conforming himself to 
 that order, that reason, that ideal, to forward, ac- 
 cording to his measure, the progress of the world, 
 to be a fellow-worker in the unending purpose that 
 runs through the ages. We can not violate this 
 order with impunity; we can not turn aside, except 
 temporarily, the progress of the world toward that 
 far-off divine event. If our age neglects its oppor- 
 tunities or fails to measure up to its responsibilities 
 or proves false to its trust, there will come after us 
 those who have learned wisdom from the disasters 
 that overwhelmed us. Just as men can not violate 
 the laws of the physical being, even ignorantly, 
 
44: A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 without paying the penalty, so they can not do 
 violence to the laws of their moral being without 
 bringing a measure of sorrow upon themselves, but 
 a far greater measure upon the state to which they 
 owe allegiance. Human responsibility is according 
 to opportunity and ability, not according to knowl- 
 edge, since it is every man's business to know what 
 his duties are, public no less than private. Napo- 
 leon was wont to declare that there are two moral- 
 ities: one for personal and one for public affairs. 
 The same doctrine was often upheld before his time 
 and still has its champions, though happily their 
 number is growing less with the progress of enlight- 
 ment. No more powerful demonstration of the 
 falsity of this doctrine could be imagined than the 
 career of the Great Corsican. Much wiser are the 
 words of Lord Acton: "I exhort you never to debase 
 the moral currency, or to lower the standard of rec- 
 titude, but to try others by the final maxim that 
 governs your own lives, and to allow no man and 
 no cause to escape the undying penalty which 
 history has the power to inflict on wrong. If in 
 our uncertainty we must often err, it may be some- 
 times better to risk excess in rigor than in indul- 
 gence; for then at least we do no injury by loss of 
 principle." 
 
 There is much history that is well worth study, 
 particularly that of Egypt and Mesopotamia. How- 
 ever, on the one hand, the records of these countries 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 45 
 
 are still very incomplete and incompletely deciph- 
 ered; and on the other, the influence of the people 
 who dwelt in these regions upon modern life is 
 somewhat remote. Besides, almost every recent 
 history of the Greeks touches upon the connection 
 of their civilization with that of the older peoples 
 and endeavors to set forth the ideas that were bor- 
 rowed from the latter by the former. What is 
 called the history of the Eastern Nations is therefore 
 a field for the specialist rather than for the general 
 reader. It is only when we enter on the study of 
 Grecian history* that we come face to face with 
 
 *The writing of history^in the true sense of the word, originat- 
 ed with the Greeks. It is true the ancient nations of the East had 
 their historians, but their object was to glorify the deeds of their 
 rulers in war or peace Their defeats aud their wrong-doings are 
 not recorded The history of Israel was written to set forth the 
 dealings of God with his chosen people: how he rewarded them 
 for keeping his commandments and punished them for disobed- 
 ience. Not so the Greeks. Herodotus says that he writes in the 
 hope of "preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks 
 and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory." No- 
 tice, that he includes the deeds of the barbarians as well as those 
 of the Greeks. He is often in error; but there is no evidence that 
 he wilfully falsifies or knowingly admits anything from motives 
 of patriotism or prejudice. Thucydides is so impartial that if he 
 had not told us we should not know whether he was an Athenian, 
 a Spartan or a Corinthian. He looks at all sides of every ques- 
 tion. He tries to fathom the motives that influenced all the 
 actors that he brings upon the stage. He summons all the wit- 
 nesses who can give any testimony that will enable him to get at 
 the truth. It is for these reasons that Ranke, the greatest his- 
 torian of modem times, calls himself a pupil of Thucydides. 
 
 Profess&r Zielinski (St. Petersburg). 
 
46 
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 modern ideas, or rather with ideas that we ignorantly 
 call "modern." The history of Greece is gradually 
 merged in that of Rome. The Roman transferred, 
 more or less transmuted ideas into Italy whence 
 they spread over Europe and to a greater or less ex- 
 tent have influenced modern life. It would per- 
 haps be putting the case too strong to allege that 
 the history of the world is continuous from its re- 
 motest beginnings in the valley of the Nile and the 
 Euphrates to our own day; but it is quite within 
 bounds to say that such is the case when we come 
 to the annals of that brilliant people who settled 
 around the shores and on the islands of the Aegean 
 in historic time. 
 
 This thought forces itself upon my attention 
 again and again and again, as I read the story, sad 
 enough in truth, of man's dealings with man, that 
 he was not made to mourn but to be happy, not 
 all the time certainly, but the larger part of the days 
 he spends upon this earth. There has always been 
 in him a germ that has struggled to develop itself; 
 that has made its way toward the light, around 
 stones and rubbish, through briars and brambles; 
 that in spite of all obstacles and adverse conditions, 
 has never been quite dead. This innate spark of 
 goodness has often smouldered under the ashes of 
 selfishness or stupidity; has sometimes burned 
 dimly under the miasmatic atmosphere of ignor- 
 ance and prejudice; but it has never been extin- 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 47 
 
 guislied. When the right moment has come; when 
 the proper conditions have arisen; when a favoring 
 breeze, as it were, from the realms of the divine has 
 blown upon it, then has it burst into a flame and 
 illumined what was before thought to be impene- 
 trable gloom. 
 
 Bonvalot, the celebrated French traveler, after 
 visiting almost all parts of the earth, declares that 
 " one finds honest people everywhere, but not many." 
 The student of history is constrained to say that 
 one finds honest people in every age of the world, 
 but not many. As the Lord was willing to pre- 
 serve Sodom and Gomorrah, if there were found in 
 them ten righteous, so it has often happened that a 
 few men of probity have saved states and cities and 
 communities. While then history teaches us the 
 sorrowful lessons of the past, it also holds aloft the 
 beacon light of faith. The story of bygone days if 
 rightly learned, will deeply impress upon each succeed- 
 ing generation that those who have labored honestly, 
 earnestly, intelligently for the good of others have 
 not labored in vain. It teaches us too that if we 
 faithfully perform our work, we may expect as a 
 reward something more substantial than a hope 
 and a shadow.* 
 
 * Since the following was written I have come across the fol- 
 lowing in a recent number of a Review. It so strongly supports 
 the position taken in the text that I add it in a foot-note. Some- 
 one has said that every science of man is auxiliary to the making 
 of history. ' ' This is literally true. The historian must have a good 
 
48 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 linguistic training especially on the side of philology ; for without a 
 knowledge of languages, no historic study can be more than 
 elementary. He must know much of economics, social science, 
 jurisprudence, philosophy and theology, and be familiar, in 
 some measure, with the physical sciences. It is more than ever 
 necessary that he know certain subjects which have been called 
 the ' satellites of history;' as numismatics, genealogies, chronol- 
 ogy, mythology, and archaeology. He must have a literary 
 training to make his story readable; the art that will give a vivid 
 impression to the reader and create a real picture of the times of 
 which he writes. * * * The historian, Freeman, in his inaug- 
 ural address at the University of Oxford, bade to his fellowship 
 'any who feel a call to learning as an object for its own sake/ 
 'But remember,' he adds, 'that it is to the pursuit of knowledge 
 for its own sake that I would call you; to the pursuit of know- 
 ledge, the pursuit of truth, to that learning which is said to be 
 better than house and land but which is perhaps not the path 
 best adapted to the winning of houses and land: or if there is any 
 object beyond, higher than the search after truth for its own 
 sake, it will be the hope that our studies of the past may be found 
 to have after all their use in the living present.' No other branch 
 of knowledge has so close a connection with mere literature as 
 history, and this has led to the controversy between those who 
 think everything should be sacrificed to historical accuracy, to 
 scientific method and detail, and another group who insist on the 
 preeminent claims of history as literature. ' The champions of 
 history as science, and history as literature, mutually yearn to 
 exterminate one another,' says a clever critic. Even those who 
 hold a middle ground, that would combine accuracy with fact and 
 interpretation with excellence in literary style, admit that the 
 unavoidable connection of history and literature gives rise to 
 certain difficulties. There is the constant and almost unconsci- 
 ous temptation to sacrifice accuracy to effect. Professor Free- 
 man admits that ' the historian, if he is to get beyond annals, 
 must have some kind of style, good or bad, and it would better 
 be a good one,' but he thinks the danger is great of preferring a 
 way of writing history which tickles the popular fancy. ' We 
 may be tempted,' he says, ' to envy the lot of the geometer or 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 49 
 
 the chemist, in whose way there are no such pitfalls. The most 
 winning style, the choicest metaphors, would be thrown away if 
 they were devoted to proving that any two sides of a triangle are 
 not always greater than a third side. When they are devoted to 
 prove that a man cut off his wife's head one day and married 
 her maid the next morning out of sheer love of country, they win 
 believers for the paradox.' * * * Another significant fact is 
 its fuller recognition of the ethical ends of history. History is 
 no mere story of the past to satisfy our curiosity: it is ' human- 
 ity becoming and .being conscious of itself.' Its main value is 
 what Froude so nobly sets forth: ' That of a voice forever 
 sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong ; that 
 justice alone can endure and live. Injustice and falsehood may 
 be long-lived, but doomsday comes at last to them, in French 
 revolutions and other terrible ways. The world is coming to see 
 with Carlyle that ' of all bibles, the frightf ullest to disbelieve in 
 is this Bible of Universal History.'" 
 
XVII 
 
 When we speak of literature we use a term of 
 very wide application. It is used of almost every kind 
 of prose and verse, good, indifferent and bad. A his- 
 tory of English literature, for example, may be 
 compressed into a single volume or it may be ex- 
 panded into a small library. De Quincey says: 
 "There is first the literature of knowledge, and 
 secondly the literature of power. The function of 
 the first is to teach; the function of the second is to 
 move\ the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a 
 sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive under- 
 standing; the second speaks, ultimately, it may 
 happen, to the higher understanding or reason but 
 always through affections and sympathy." The 
 first deals primarily with facts and their relation to 
 each other; the second appeals to the imagination, 
 though the two can never be wholly separated. 
 The former is usually prose; the latter poetry. For 
 example, much that Tyndall and Huxley and 
 Spencer wrote is rightly classed as literature. These 
 writers deal almost entirely with facts or with what 
 are accepted as facts and with the relations of these 
 facts to one another. These facts are perceived by 
 the senses and the reasoning powers; they are 
 
 50 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 51 
 
 arranged under the direction of the imagination 
 and the aesthetic sense. Many things exist which 
 are not visible to the eye of the body. Prom- 
 inence is given to that which is most important 
 while that which is least important is made sub- 
 ordinate. Grant's Memoirs is one of the most 
 notable contributions to literature by an American, 
 yet it deals entirely with facts. When we call to 
 mind what a mass of matter our Civil War called 
 into print we must consider it remarkable that 
 only a very small portion is likely to take rank 
 with this unpretentious volume. The story is so 
 simply told that almost any one who reads it thinks 
 he could tell it as well until he tries. 
 
 Innumerable are the volumes of history that have 
 been written since the days of Herodotus and Thu- 
 cydides, but how few rise to the rank of literature. 
 In literature the chief factor is the imagination. 
 Any subject from which the play of the imagination 
 is wholly excluded, as, for example, mathematics, 
 can not be treated as literature.* 
 
 * "The highest rank in literature belongs to those who combine 
 the properly poetical with philosophical qualities and crown both 
 with a certain robust sincerity of common sense. The sovereign 
 poet must be not merely a singer, but also a sage; to passion and 
 music he must add large ideas; he must extend in width as well 
 as in height; but besides this he must be no dreamer or fanatic, 
 and must be rooted as firmly in the hard earth as he spreads most 
 widely and mounts freely towards the sky." "Literature is per- 
 haps at least a compromise between truth and fancy, between 
 seriousness and trifling. It can not do without something of pop- 
 
 *- 
 
52 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 The successful historian must be endowed with a 
 vivid imagination in order to be able to transplant 
 himself amid the scenes he describes. It is by means 
 of this faculty that the poet endows irrational ani- 
 mals and inanimate objects with sentiency and even 
 with reason and will. The denizens of the air are 
 favorite themes with the poets. Shelley's Cloud is 
 a fine example of the attribution of purpose emotion 
 and volition to inert matter. Both this poem and 
 his Skylark are equal to the finest choral odes in 
 the Greek dramas. In the domain of prose litera- 
 ture there is probably nothing superior, as a work 
 of imagination, to Gulliver's Travels. 
 
 ularity, and yet the writer who thinks much of popularity is 
 unfaithful to his mission; on the other hand he who leans too 
 heavily on literature breaks through into science or practical 
 business." J. R. Seeley. Neither literature nor science deals ex- 
 clusively with those subjects that are of the highest importance 
 to man; but of the former at least it must be said that it always 
 has to do with themes that are in the highest degree interesting 
 to man. 
 
 "Science is thought embodied in writing; literature is 
 thought first moulded into form by the idealizing process of the 
 human mind, and then, when so moulded, expressed in writing. 
 Where the idealizing process has been employed by the author, 
 there, in whatever branch of literature it may be, will be the ap- 
 peal to the imagination of the reader. For this power to affect 
 the imagination revel as the presence of the ' something more * 
 added by the writer the presence, that is, of the personal ele- 
 ment which raises history or biography to the rank of literature, 
 and lends a new value to the work of the philosopher or the man 
 of science. " Worsfold. 
 
 "The world's greatest literature, we may assume, was like un- 
 to this. Science can be duplicated or gone over again, or it can 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 53 
 
 be dropped and taken up again at the same point. It can be re- 
 newed. The highest forms of literature come we know not 
 whence and go we know not whither; and this accounts for in- 
 stances in such work where even one verse remains in the mem- 
 ory of mankind while all the rest is lost. We have now the key 
 to that atrophy on one side of Darwin's nature. It was in his 
 case the Nemesis of Science the price he paid for his magnifi- 
 cent achievements. Poetry is not a part of Science, but it is, as 
 Wordsworth once said, 'the antithesis of science'; it is a world 
 outside. The name of this world, we may conclude, is litera- 
 ture." T. W. Higginson. 
 
 " The object of literature is delight; its soul is imagination; its 
 body is style. Nothing depends upon the subject; all depends 
 upon the treatment of the subject. It is not necessary that a 
 good poet or a good prose writer should be a good man, though 
 it is a pity that he should not be. And literature is not subject 
 to the laws of morality, though it is to those of manners. " 
 Saintsburg. 
 
XVIII. 
 
 The most interesting and instructive feature of 
 literature, using the term literature in a somewhat 
 limited sense, is the fact that from the remotest times 
 the greatest thinkers have pondered the weighty prob- 
 lems that still engage the attention of reflective 
 minds. The prophets of Old Testament times; the 
 Greek tragic poets; Plato, Aristotle and many other 
 ancient writers perceived the conflict between human 
 conduct and the moral law just as clearly as we see 
 it to-day. Though the sphere of their observations 
 was comparatively circumscribed, yet in so far as 
 they dealt with human nature and human motives 
 their materials were sufficiently plentiful. Their 
 generalizations were drawn from fewer data but 
 these were representative in their character. They 
 recognized that men can not escape the penalty for 
 infringements of the moral law; but how to make 
 this sufficiently evident to those who were chiefly 
 responsible for the destiny of society was a problem 
 that seemed to the Greeks at least impossible of 
 solution. Hence an undertone of despair, or, at 
 best, of resignation, permeates their writings. In 
 striking contrast with this is modern literature, 
 
 especially that which is instinctively if not distinct- 
 
 54 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 55 
 
 ively Christian. The Greeks felt that right and 
 justice ought to prevail; Jews and Christians, that 
 it must and will prevail. There is nothing in an- 
 cient Greek or Roman literature which shows that 
 the writer believed and felt that somehow good must 
 come from every seeming ill; 
 
 " That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God has made the pile complete." 
 
 Certain it is that if their countrymen had 
 heeded the counsels of the most enlightened 
 among them, whether Greeks or Romans, the an- 
 cient world would not have perished as it did; nor 
 would the earth for nearly a thousand years have 
 almost everywhere been drinking up the blood of 
 her children. But the practical politicians, and in 
 fact the practical men and women generally, looked 
 upon the thinkers as mere dreamers and sentimen- 
 talists, who dwelt in an ideal world, who were of no 
 use where offices are to be fought for and the 
 money that goes with them. It is worth any man's 
 study to note how little our manuals of ethics differ 
 from Cicero's Offices; and the work of Cicero was 
 built upon a Greek foundation of Greek materials. 
 In like manner there are few writers on the instruc- 
 tion of the young that breathe a finer spirit than 
 Quintilian and Plutarch. Everywhere we find the 
 same thought made prominent that Locke so forci- 
 
56 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 bly put when he wrote that the love of truth for 
 truth's sake is the principal part of human perfec- 
 tion and the seed-plot of all other virtues. If, there- 
 fore, ambitious young people are sometimes discour- 
 aged because there is so much they would like to 
 read, let them take heart in the reflection that 
 among all the mass of matter that pours from the 
 press, there is but little that adds to the sum of 
 available human knowledge. 
 
XIX 
 
 It is worthy of note that society made no progress 
 until a forward movement was started by the Greeks. 
 For thousands of years the people that we are wont 
 to call civilized lived on in their traditional rou- 
 tine, each generation doing just what its predecessor 
 had done and doing it in the same way. When 
 Greek influences began to decline, society also 
 began to retrograde. This is not saying that the 
 Greek language has been the great psychic motor 
 in civilization, but only that the spirit of inquiry, 
 of investigation, the quest for knowledge, was inaug- 
 urated by the Greeks and by them only. So far as 
 the language is concerned, its history is curious. 
 The Greeks cared nothing for any language but 
 their mother tongue, why, need not concern us 
 here. When the political decline of Greece had set 
 in, its literature in some measure passed into Italy, 
 where it was taken up by the Romans, and from 
 about 200 B. C., if not earlier, every educated Ro- 
 man spoke Greek, often as fluently as his own lan- 
 guage. St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans 
 in Greek; Diodorus, of Scicily, composed his gene- 
 ral History in the same language,while the emperor, 
 
 57 
 
58 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, employed it as the most fitting 
 vehicle to bear his Meditations to posterity. Roman 
 writers on pedagogy would have the Greek taught 
 along with the Latin; and this seems to have been 
 the general practice except on the schools of the 
 poor. When the empire went to pieces, classical 
 Latin was virtually forgotten even in Italy and 
 Greece. Barbarism reigned everywhere. The past 
 was buried under the miseries of the present. There 
 were no schools. Most of the people had all they 
 could do to keep body and soul together; there 
 was neither time nor means nor inclination, to de- 
 vote to anything else. This condition of things 
 continued for nearly a thousand years, with a few 
 brief periods of betterment. In the course of time, 
 however, a coterie of men in Italy began to study 
 Greek; with it they imbibed the Greek spirit. 
 Their eyes were opened; they saw what they had 
 never seen before though it was all around them. To 
 these men the discovery was like receiving an addi- 
 tional sense; like a revelation from the dead; and 
 they soon devoted all their energies to making 
 known the treasure trove to the western world. 
 Reuchlin, one of the first Germans to master the 
 Greek language, maintained that nobody could be 
 regarded as educated who knew not Greek. A 
 little later Melanchthon took the same ground. 
 The position was logical for their day, since all its 
 knowledge had its root in Greek. In the same era 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 59 
 
 Erasmus was the protagonist for Greek and pro- 
 bably did more to promote its study than any other 
 man before or since his time. The religious awak- 
 ening in Germany was the logical sequel to the in- 
 tellectual awakening in Italy. After the Protes- 
 tant Revolution had in a measure spent its force, a 
 decline set in, one of the results of which was that 
 Europe produced very few distinguished scholars 
 during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
 though the language was never without its valiant 
 defenders. In England in the time of Queen Eliz- 
 abeth even women studied Greek. It was during 
 her reign that George Chapman made his celebrated 
 translation of Homer. But owing to the decline of 
 interest in the subject with which it deals, no sec- 
 ond edition was called for until nearly two hundred 
 years later. During all this time Latin was dili- 
 gently cultivated and by use of the Latin translations 
 of the Greek masterpieces, a knowledge of Greek 
 thought was kept alive. A number of noted edu- 
 cationists, among them Herbart, maintained that 
 Greek ought to precede Latin in a course of liberal 
 education. The theory is logical, but the plan is 
 scarcely practicable for several reasons, the most 
 weighty being the difficulty of learning its pecu- 
 lar alphabet. Another serious drawback is the 
 number of dialects, an objection that cannot be made 
 against the Latin. 
 
XX 
 
 I believe that in our day very few even of those 
 who maintain that Greek contributes more than any 
 other discipline to a liberal education, insist that its 
 value lies wholly or even chiefly in an accurate 
 knowledge of the language. Most competent judges 
 admit that few persons can take the time to acquire 
 the language so as to be able to read it with suffi- 
 cient ease to give it much culture value. The point 
 on which stress is laid is that Greek is the mainspring 
 of all modern literature and that almost all the 
 great writers have been more or less influenced by 
 it; not necessarily at first but nevertheless influ- 
 enced. If in our reading we come across a reference 
 to the Iliad, or the Odyssey, or to Marathon and 
 Salamis, or to Socrates and Plato, we may have at 
 hand a cyclopedia that will tell us briefly what 
 these names mean. But how much better to read 
 Homer a few times, or Herodotus, or the Reminis- 
 cences of Socrates preserved by Xenophon! If we 
 were to take from Shelley and Keats, from Brown- 
 ing and Tennyson, to mention only a few modern 
 English poets, what they owe to the Greek literature, 
 there would still be much left, it is true; but there 
 would be large gaps in their writings. 
 
XXI 
 
 Having thus briefly set forth my reasons for hold- 
 ing that history and literature are indispensable 
 factors in a liberal education I add one other sub- 
 ject that is at least in the highest degree important, 
 this is Latin. I believe that Latin ought to be 
 an obligatory study in every first-class High School, 
 and that students should be excused from pursuing 
 it only in very rare cases. It might well take the 
 place of any one or two or even more subjects that 
 are far less important but which have crowded it 
 out wholly or in part because they are supposed to 
 do the pupil "more good." It is my matured con- 
 viction that three or four years of Latin contributes 
 to the training of the intellect certain factors that 
 nothing else can. Of course, I take it for granted 
 that the teaching will be done by competent instruct- 
 ors. Though the student gets along only far enough 
 to read the easiest authors, he has gained a lin- 
 guistic point of view which can not be acquired by 
 the study of a modern language. It is a highly val- 
 uable accomplishment to be able to use the English 
 language with force and precision, an accomplish- 
 ment which the best Latinist may not possess; but 
 the latter has gained a certain kind of insight which it 
 
 61 
 
62 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 is impossible to attain from the one-language point 
 of view. Skill in the use of the vernacular is largely 
 a "gift", at least up to a certain point, and generally 
 comes into the possession of persons without their 
 knowing how. It is perhaps not much the less 
 valuable on that account, at least so far as produc- 
 ing an impression is concerned even the Indians 
 are said to be eloquent but it is not necessarily a 
 mark of intelligence or of knowledge. In such 
 cases it is out of the fulness of the heart that the 
 mouth speaketh, not out of fulness of information. 
 The modern penny-a-liner who is everywhere in 
 evidence in our ephemeral literature can spin out 
 picturesque or lurid English by the column day 
 after day on subjects of which he knows next to 
 nothing; but in a week, if not sooner, it is forgotten. 
 This is what is euphemistically called ' 'journalism", 
 in reality it is the art of making a short story 
 long, or of making words supply the lack of ideas. 
 To be fairly master of a modern culture-language 
 is an acquirement by no means easy or one to be 
 underestimated; but such a language deals with 
 modern ideas and more or less from the modern 
 standpoint; with conditions that are relatively mod- 
 ern: so we ha vein a large measure over again what 
 we can get in English. At any rate, when we are 
 seeking information about ancient times we should 
 read read ancient books; it is better to do so even 
 if we have to depend upon translations. We have 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 63 
 
 many romances whose authors endeavor to portray 
 the life of the men and women of old. It is quite safe 
 to say that all are more or less false to the realty. 
 What is called "romantic love" is the life-breath of 
 the modern novel. This is especially true of those 
 written for English readers. The sentiment is 
 almost invariably transferred to persons who are 
 assumed to have lived two milleniums and longer 
 ago. Yet every person who is fairly familiar with 
 ancient life knows that the relations of the sexes with 
 each other were then so entirely different to those 
 existing in modern times, especially among the Ger- 
 manic races, that the anachronism is fatal to the 
 probabilities of the story. 
 
XXII 
 
 When I was a boy and later a young man I used 
 to attend literary societies. One of the exercises 
 was always a debate. A question more than once 
 discussed was whether the pursuit or the possession 
 of an object affords the largest amount of pleasure. 
 I remember scarcely anything of what was said upon 
 the topic; but I came to recognize later that if the 
 pursuit of knowledge had been brought within the 
 range of our deliberations there would have been 
 no occasion for a division of the question: here pur- 
 suit always includes possession. The seeker for 
 truth is not only receiving pleasure from the quest; 
 he is constantly coming into possession also. In 
 other words, pursuit and possession are interchange- 
 able terms and conditions. Lessing has said some- 
 where that if God were to give him the choice be- 
 tween the pursuit and the possession of truth he 
 would unhesitatingly choose the former. This can 
 only mean that he would make such a choice if the 
 one were to bar out the other, if possession were to 
 exclude pursuit and be a finality. It is not difficult 
 to conceive why a man with an active and inquisi- 
 tive mind should make such a choice. What we 
 call ultimate or final truths will probably forever 
 
 64 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 65 
 
 elude mortal grasp. But between these and what 
 we know at any given time there is the vast and 
 illimitable domain of knowable truths which we can 
 enlarge as long as we live. Even if we never dis- 
 cover or think anything except what some great 
 mind has already known, it affords us a high degree 
 of satisfaction to find it out for ourselves. Psycho- 
 logical truths unlike the application of the laws of 
 the physical universe to the moving of machinery 
 do but slowly become the property of all mankind. 
 Whatever is worth careful consideration at all is 
 worth thinking about a hundred, yea, a thousand 
 times. It is only by the exercise of our intellectual 
 faculties upon some worthy object that the least 
 gifted among us can approach nearer and ever 
 nearer the great lights among men. 
 
XXIII 
 
 As I have used the term higher, and as it is always 
 employed in the discussion of educational problems, 
 it will not be amiss to pause a moment to consider 
 in what sense it is to be understood, whether in 
 morals or in pedagogy. Generally speaking, a good 
 that is remote is higher than one that is near. We 
 may say of a laborer who lays by a portion of his 
 earnings for future needs that he acts upon a higher 
 motive than one who consumes all his earnings 
 from day to day. The reason why famines period- 
 ically afflict such countries as Russia and India is 
 that the peasants never think of putting aside any- 
 thing for those years when there may be a failure 
 of crops. Like children they consume almost from 
 day to day all the soil yields. They have therefore 
 not advanced beyond the thoughtless and improvi- 
 dent stage of childhood. While it is true that the 
 provident spirit may degenerate into avarice and 
 niggardliness and lead only to the thought of hoard- 
 ing without a legitimate purpose, the latter vice is 
 less blameworthy than the former. Again, he who 
 prefers an intellectual and moral good to a mere 
 material one acts from a higher motive than does 
 he who is concerned only to accumulate material 
 
 66 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 67 
 
 wealth. There is always danger that material gains 
 will be made at the expense of some one else, and 
 that the desire to lay up earthly treasures may 
 degenerate into a sort of insanity, or at least mono- 
 mania. On the other hand, he who seeks only en- 
 richment of mind not only deprives no one else of 
 anything but makes every one who comes within 
 the sphere of his influence to some extent wiser and 
 is very likely to make him better. While it can 
 not be affirmed without qualification that the best 
 informed persons are also the best, it is true as a 
 general proposition. Education is perhaps as much 
 a matter of the emotions and the will as of the in- 
 tellect; yet the cultivation of the intellect through 
 the development of the mind as a whole by a sys- 
 tematic process, has a tendency to bring under 
 control both the emotions and the will. The his- 
 tory of the ancient Greeks proves that their failure 
 was not so much due to a lack of judgment as to a 
 lack of self-control. It is easy to see that among the 
 best informed nations there is the least misery and 
 the most general well-being. Then too, few people 
 doubt that our age is on the whole better off than 
 any that has preceded it; on the whole it is likewise 
 better informed than any that has preceded it. If 
 we put our estimate of the comparative value of 
 knowlege at the very lowest proportion and claim 
 no more than that out of one hundred educated men 
 fifty one are better than they would otherwise be 
 
68 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 there is a distinct though slight upward tendency, 
 Albeit, we do well to remember that there is an 
 avarice of knowledge as well as of money, and that 
 the former may be almost as deleterious to the com- 
 munity as the latter. A mere book -worm is of little 
 use to anybody; though it must be said that the 
 harm he does to others and to himself is of a neg- 
 ative sort. He is a non-producer and contributes 
 nothing to the welfare of the state that protects him. 
 The miser, on the other hand, is a detriment not 
 only to himself but likewise to his fellow men. The 
 redeeming feature of his case is that he must die 
 sometime and can not take his accumulations with 
 him. When they come into other hands they may 
 be controlled by wiser heads. 
 
XXIV 
 
 We sometimes meet persons who dispose of the 
 question of education in toto by citing such examples 
 as Washington and Lincoln. They tell us that 
 these men were both great and good, though they 
 knew but one language and had received very little 
 systematic instruction. All of which is true. But 
 we need always to keep in mind that genius and 
 even a high order of talent goes its own way and 
 can not be used as a guide for the average of man- 
 kind. England has produced a number of disting- 
 uished women in almost all departments of intellect- 
 ual activity; yet England, until very lately, did 
 almost nothing for the education of girls. A highly 
 endowed mind finds its food and stimulus every- 
 where; it needs but little incitement or assistance. 
 If we take the examples of the great ones of the 
 earth for our guide we need no schools at all; we 
 have only to let every one educate himself as best 
 he can. That has been the way of the world until 
 almost our own time. We have not tried long what 
 seems to us the better course; we have no need 
 therefore as yet to be disheartened with results. It 
 is not only possible but highly probable that some 
 persons are more harmed than helped by being held 
 
 69 
 
70 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 to a prescribed curriculum; but no rule can be form- 
 ulated that takes account of every exceptional case. 
 It is greatly to the credit of England that so many 
 of her sons have devoted their leisure to scientific 
 and historical investigations. George Grote, Charles 
 Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Sir John Lubbock, E. B. 
 Tylor and Sir Francis Falton, to mention only a 
 fevv, have not been teachers in the usual sense of 
 the term; yet it is doubtful whether any other six 
 men living in the latter half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury could be named who have discovered and cor- 
 related a larger number of facts. Some of them 
 were or are successful men of affairs; but instead of 
 devoting themselves exclusively to business they 
 gave much of their time and thought to research and 
 to the dissemination of classified knowledge. We 
 have often been told that in general business only 
 three men in a hundred are successful and that the 
 other ninety-seven ultimately fail. Whether this 
 be strictly true or not it is true in substance, as any 
 one can verify for himself. Sad indeed must be the 
 reflection of the man who when he approaches the 
 close of a life wholly absorbed in the pursuit of per- 
 ishable things, realizes that these have slipped from 
 his grasp almost in the using. On the contrary he 
 who has labored for the good of men, for the dis- 
 semination of truth, for the mental and moral cul- 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 71 
 
 ture of himself and of those he can influence, has 
 the satisfaction of knowing that he has not lived in 
 vain though the earthly treasures he leaves behind 
 be but few. 
 
 
 
XXV 
 
 Unfortunately the education called liberal has in 
 a large number of cases failed to produce in fact the 
 results and effects that are usually claimed for it in 
 theory. Many distinguished scholars have been 
 men of bad character and vicious principles. 
 Petrarch, who was an enthusiast for everything of 
 Greek provenience, was a man of low morals and 
 his friend Boccaccio was if possible worse. It is no 
 excuse for them that low morals were the order of 
 the day and that nobody was the less thought of for 
 leading a loose life. The pitiful career of Lord 
 Bacon is familiar to everybody. Richard Porson, 
 who probably knew the Greek language better than 
 any other Englishman before or since his time, was 
 a confirmed sot. William Dindorf the editor of 
 innumerable Greek texts was the embodiment of 
 greed. And so through a long list. Some of the 
 great classical scholars might spend hours over a 
 manuscript trying to determine whether an ancient 
 author had written sed or set, or an ablative in- i or 
 -e, but they would not hesitate a moment, when a 
 suitable opportunity offered, to gratify some base 
 instinct. Not a few of them were guilty of acts they 
 would have condemned in a Hottentot. Just as 
 
 72 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 73 
 
 some physicians habitually violate the laws of health, 
 so some men of great abilities or of great erudition 
 are regardless of the long and well tried maxims of 
 morality. Neither the physician nor the scholar 
 would commend to others their own conduct; but 
 as a man's works are the surest test of his faith their 
 example was sometimes more powerful than their 
 precepts. Pitiful indeed is it when it must be said 
 of any one, "What a misfortune that such a well 
 educated man should set such a pernicious example." 
 
XXVI 
 
 There is a term often used in connection with lib- 
 eral education which it may be well to consider 
 briefly in this connection: this term is culture. It 
 designates that ineffable charm of manner that 
 prompts all the words and actions of some people 
 and makes them such delightful companions. It 
 is this affability that was so highly prized by the 
 ancient Greeks, a people who did not lay much 
 stress upon extensive intellectual attainments, and 
 which Socrates so well exemplified in the Platonic 
 Dialogues. Though it would perhaps be unjust to 
 say that a person can be liberally educated and yet 
 be lacking in culture, it is certainly true that wide 
 information is not synonymous with culture and may 
 exist without it. Among the ancients Plutarch is 
 conspicuous for extensive knowledge and for culture 
 as well. This happy union shines forth in almost 
 all that he wrote. Plato, on the other hand, is dis- 
 tinguished for the profundity of his thoughts no less 
 than for urbaneness; yet compared with the highest 
 standards of our day, his knowledge was relatively 
 limited. He had acquired the habit of mind that 
 prompted him always to draw personal profit from 
 everything that transpired around him. We are 
 
 74 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 75 
 
 told that when he saw anyone do a foolish or un- 
 kind deed he always asked himself whether he 
 could be guilty of the same. In this way he made 
 every circumstance of his life contribute to his own 
 culture and moral education. So we may say of a 
 book, that it is of no value to us if it does not con- 
 vey a lesson that we feel it our duty and our gain 
 to make our own. It ought either to place before 
 us examples to follow, or to avoid, or both. No book 
 is worth reading that does not have a message for 
 us personally; that does not make us wiser as well 
 as better informed. 
 
XXVII 
 
 I often meditate upon an experience I had about 
 a score of years ago in the State of Illinois. Shortly 
 after my train had left Chicago I found myself 
 occupying the same seat with an elderly gentleman 
 whose conversation soon revealed him as a unique 
 character. Though he belonged to the class of so- 
 called self-made men he was wholly free from the 
 bumptiousness and self-conceit generally character- 
 istic of those who take pride in believing that they 
 owe nothing to any one but themselves. 
 
 He was evidently only a plain farmer who had 
 acquired a competence by thrift, but he had never 
 allowed material interests to monopolize his thoughts. 
 He had read many standard books, English as well 
 as translations from the ancient classics. While he 
 did not always express himself with grammatical 
 correctness his logic was excellent. His reading 
 had been to such good purpose and had so sharp- 
 ened his wits that he knew much which he did not 
 get from books. He was a keen observer and a 
 lucid interpreter of current social phenomena. Yet 
 he was modest in putting forth his opinions; always 
 ready to admit that he or his authorities might be 
 in error; and not only willing but eager to have his 
 views controverted. 
 
 76 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 77 
 
 It was about ten o'clock in the evening when I 
 parted from my new acquaintance at a little town 
 called Vermont. Here I had to wait for a train on 
 a different railroad. It happened that another man 
 was in the same predicament with myself. We two 
 being the sole occupants of the waiting-room natur- 
 ally fell into conversation. He soon informed me 
 that he was president of some educational institu- 
 tion farther west; that he received a larger salary 
 than any other educator in his State and much 
 larger than the Commissioner of Education at Wash- 
 ington. He strutted back and forth in the little 
 waiting-room like a turkey cock in a barnyard and 
 left nothing unsaid that he thought would impress 
 me with his attainments and importance. 
 
 All the while I was mentally comparing 
 him with the gentleman from whom I had just 
 parted; and the comparison was decidedly in the 
 latter's favor. The former was insufferably con- 
 ceited; puffed up with admiration of himself, dicta- 
 torial and shallow. He knew a good many smart 
 tricks, which knowledge he mistook for wisdom. 
 What he did not know was not worth knowing; 
 what he could not do no one else could. Though 
 he was a graduate of a reputable college and called 
 himself an educator, he knew nothing thoroughly 
 and had not the slightest conception of the signifi- 
 cance of such phrases as "original investigation", 
 "knowledge at first hand". 
 
78 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 Yet this man had what he called and what 
 doubtless many other persons would call a lib- 
 eral education, while the former had, by his own 
 confession, no education at all. It would not take 
 a discriminating judge long to decide which of the 
 twain was the higher sort of a man, or which one 
 had turned his knowledge to the great profit. 
 One of them had the form of a liberal education 
 without its spirit; the other its spirit without its 
 form. 
 
XXVIII 
 
 It is the duty of the liberally educated man to 
 participate to some extent in politics; but he must 
 not be a politician in the usual acceptation of the 
 term. The politician is one who seeks office for 
 what he can make out of it; he pursues higher ob- 
 jects only so far as they promote his own personal 
 ends. It can not be denied that a man may be a 
 candidate for a public office from honorable and 
 disinterested motives; but in practice this is the 
 exception much oftener than the rule. If knowl- 
 edge does not promote good government, better 
 government than the world has yet seen, the whole 
 trend of modern thought is wrong. Autocracies 
 have been tried and found wanting; oligarchies 
 have proved unsatisfactory; limited democracies 
 equally so. The latest experiments, those now be- 
 ing tried in the United States, in France, and to 
 some extent in England, with democracies pure and 
 simple, complete the cycle of experiments in gov- 
 ernments. Even where the monarchical form is 
 retained the people are entrusted with more and 
 more power. If their increasing intelligence does 
 not make clear their duties and responsibilities 
 nothing else will. There must probably always be 
 
 79 
 
80 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 more or less corruption in government, but it ought 
 to become continually less. Government can be 
 good only in the hands of good men, of men who 
 prefer the common welfare to their own individual 
 profit. A high standard of public morality and a 
 fair degree of public prosperity are impossible with- 
 out good laws impartially administered. It is true 
 that laws alone are not able to make a community 
 moral, but it is only through law that public opin- 
 ion can make itself permanently felt. Quiescent 
 anarchism like that preached by Tolstoi, or ultra 
 individualism such as Thoreau tried to put in prac- 
 tice, are the wildest folly. 
 
 A people that adheres tenaciously to its past and 
 doggedly refuses to take account of what is going 
 on elsewhere in the world is doomed to destruction 
 or to hopeless stagnation. History furnishes abun- 
 dant instances, while Russia, Spain and China are 
 shining examples in the present, if that can be said 
 to shine which is chiefly conspicuous for absence of 
 light. But to ignore the past and to attempt to be- 
 gin at the beginning, as it were, is almost equally 
 fatal. The work of the radical French revolution- 
 ists is conspicuous evidence that a nation suddenly 
 thrown out of its routine will gradually glide back 
 again. Drastic legislation is rarely wise legislation. 
 It is only when the future is intelligently built upon 
 the past that violent relapses do not occur. 
 
 The great astronomer, Kepler, is said to have ex- 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 81 
 
 claimed in the extasy of delight after he had made 
 his great discovery: " Oh God, I think thy thoughts 
 after thee." He thus but expresses the joy that 
 comes to every serious -minded person when he is 
 engaged in the search for and discovery of truth. 
 It is impossible to conceive of a nobler enjoyment. 
 It is moreover the sort of enjoyment that only 
 minds of the finest texture can experience. Nor is 
 it blunted by the reflection that it has been pur- 
 chased at the expense of anyone else. Yet it would 
 be incorrect to say that it fills the mind more com- 
 pletely than does the satisfaction of the man who 
 has made a great deal of money by a trick, or a 
 sharp bargain, or a successful mercantile transac- 
 tion. The moral standard of many men is deter- 
 mined by the statute law. For them everything is 
 admissable that does not put them in the criminal 
 calendar. The intrinsic moral merits and aspects 
 of any particular transaction have no interest for 
 them. With them conscience is a dead faculty, 
 when there is a question of money or power. The 
 vulture delights in carrion because it satisfies a car- 
 nal appetite. That such food is abhorred even by 
 clean beasts is of no concern to the unclean bird. 
 The hawk does not spare the dove because of its 
 beauty, no more will the man spare his victim 
 whose sole aim is to accumulate pelf. He has but 
 one kind of appetite and it must be gratified when 
 a victim can be found. I know that writers of fie- 
 
82 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 tion and moralists tell us that a feeling of shame ac- 
 companies a base act. I fear it is often not so. I 
 fear the words of Roinola do not always hold good 
 when she says: " And so, my Lillo, if you mean to 
 act nobly and seek to know the best that God has 
 put within the reach of men, you must learn to fix 
 your mind on that end, and not on what will hap- 
 pen to you because of it. And remember, if you 
 were to choose something lower, and make it the 
 rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and es- 
 cape from what is disagreeable, calamity might 
 come just the same; and it would be calamity fall- 
 ing on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow 
 that has no balm in it, and that may well make a 
 man say, ' It would have been better for me if I had 
 never been born.' ' 
 
 On the other hand, we do well to remember the 
 averment about the proportion of men in general 
 business who fail that is given in XXIV, a condition 
 of things that gave John Ruskin great satisfaction. 
 We are on insecure ground when we undertake to 
 measure the feelings of our fellow men. As there 
 are no two faces precisely alike, so there are prob- 
 ably no two minds that correspond in every part- 
 But the testimony of the many who regretted a life 
 devoted to sordid pursuits is abundant, and in the 
 
 main agrees with that of Wolsey: 
 
 "Had I but served my God with half the zeal 
 I served my king, he would not in mine age 
 Have left me naked to mine enemies." 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 83 
 
 There is thus a strong probability that Romola 
 was right. How different were the reflections of 
 John Wesley when he was nearing the end and 
 looked back over a long life unselfishly given to 
 the service of his fellow men: " The best of all is, 
 God is with us." Nathan Hale under the shadow 
 of the gallows regretted that he had but one life to 
 give his country. Even Napoleon, the greatest 
 criminal of the nineteenth century, when in exile he 
 had the leisure to reflect upon his career, tried to 
 persuade himself and perhaps succeeded in persuad- 
 ing his friends, that he had the good of France at 
 heart more than his own aggrandizement. There 
 is something in man's nature which makes him feel 
 that a life of selfishness is an unworthy life. "We 
 may not and often do not win the gratitude of those 
 for whom we have made many sacrifices, but we 
 feel that it is better to have deserved and not to 
 have received than not to have deserved. 
 
 In an age when, and especially in a country 
 where, almost everything is supposed to be within 
 the reach of those who have money and the will to 
 use it, and where the opportunities for gain are 
 abundant, many people naturally come to attribute 
 greater influence to wealth than it possesses. They 
 also assume that this age is more venal than any 
 that has preceded it. The evidence does not justify 
 such a conclusion. There has never been a time 
 when the humane sentiments were more potent and 
 
84: A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 when so much money was devoted to enter- 
 prises of a philanthropic or educational or aesthetic 
 character. Much injustice still prevails, but never 
 so little as at present. Those who are wronged or 
 imagine themselves wronged, at once make known 
 to the world their grievances, while until recently 
 they could only suffer in silence. Old Testament 
 history is not lacking in evidence as to the baseness 
 of men; nor are examples wanting in the New. The 
 Greeks were not only venal as private individuals, 
 but many of them were always ready to sell their 
 country. The love of luxury and the love of 
 ease destroyed the Roman empire. In almost every 
 country of Europe until recently, justice was pur- 
 chasable, if legal decisions thus obtained can be 
 called justice. The custom is not yet outgrown in 
 all of them. There have never been so many peo- 
 ple devoting themselves to the good of men without 
 hope of earthly reward; there have never been so 
 many agencies in operation for aiding the destitute 
 and unfortunate; there has never been so much 
 done to give every one a chance as in our day. 
 Before the end of the present generation the craze 
 for wealth will, to some extent, have spent itself. 
 Its successors will have learned that money cannot 
 purchase the highest good within the reach of man- 
 kind. There are many to-day who have not bowed 
 the knee to Baal; who do not worship the golden 
 calf; and the number will increase as the years go by. 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION 85 
 
 To him who shall ask and the question is often 
 asked in some form What is the profit of all this ? 
 What is the gain of knowing as much as possible, 
 and of doing the best one can in the largest way ? 
 I can only reply: There is no answer for you! The 
 motive that prompts the question is abundant evi- 
 dence that no answer can be given. We might as 
 well try to answer a fish that should ask what is the 
 use of wings or feathers, since it lives in an element 
 where these bodily accessories would not only be 
 useless but a positive disadvantage. We may as 
 well inquire, What is the use of complete living ? 
 Such inquiries usually have behind them a sneer 
 at all magnanimous aims and are prompted by the 
 disposition to get out of life as much as possible and 
 to put into it as little as possible. 
 
 But to those who believe with Milton that every 
 citizen ought to be a minister of that "complete and 
 generous education which fits a man to perform 
 justly, skilfully and magnaminously, all the offices, 
 both public and private, in peace and in war," the 
 message here proclaimed will not have been spoken 
 in vain. With a slight change in the words of the 
 Savior I may say, If ye will do my works ye shall 
 know my doctrine whether it be from above. If ye 
 will seek the highest intellectual and moral attain- 
 ments ye shall know that there is great good in so 
 doing. Other answer there is none. Try me and 
 see if I am good. 
 
86 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 We must taste the fruit of the tree of evil whether 
 we will or no; let us then partake voluntarily and 
 freely of the fruit of the tree of good, the leaves 
 whereof are for the healing of the nations. Then 
 shall we think grandly, live nobly, and pass peace- 
 fully away. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Several of the world's great libraries contain more 
 than a million volumes. If now we consider that 
 in order to read two volumes of average size per 
 week a person can not do much else, and that at 
 this rate it would require fifty years to read five 
 thousand volumes, we are able to realize to some 
 extent the magnitude of such a collection of books. 
 When, on the other hand, we reflect that many of 
 them are editions of the same work; or are transla- 
 tions of the same original; or are treatises on the 
 same subject; or are mere commentaries, we begin 
 to comprehend that the contents of such a library 
 are not commensurate in value with their bulk. 
 
 It must be plain moreover that every serious- 
 minded person who reads for culture needs a guide 
 through a labyrinth of this sort: the more so as the 
 world's literary output keeps on increasing at the 
 rate of some tens of thousands of volumes a year. 
 It is well then to remember the proverb: "Age is a 
 recommendation in four things old wood to burn, 
 old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old books 
 to read." One exception should however be made: 
 in science: it is generally safe to assume that the 
 latest books are the most worth reading. 
 
 87 
 
88 APPENDIX 
 
 I have been led to prepare the following list in 
 the hope that it may be found useful by a few per- 
 sons who feel the need of a guide to what is the 
 best, or at least superlatively good, in the world of 
 letters. It would be preposterous to maintain that 
 any list is absolutely and unconditionally the best; 
 but it is entirely within reason to claim for the fol- 
 lowing that another equally representative list 
 could not be drawn that should omit even the 
 larger part of the titles it includes. 
 
 Some of thes books "are no longer read," to use 
 the current phrase. But that is no reason why they 
 should not be read. Many of them occupy an im- 
 portant place in the intellectual development of the 
 race and of the nation. Childhood and youth are 
 just as much an integral part of human life as ma- 
 ture manhood and ripe old age. He is but a poor 
 sort of a creature who can say, "I am not interested 
 in children;" just as he is the narrowest sort of a 
 bigot who is not interested in anybody but himself 
 or his own age or in anything that can not or will 
 not minister to his own selfishness. Far nobler is 
 the sentiment put into the mouth of one of his char- 
 acters by Terence: "I am a man and do not con- 
 sider anything that pertains to man alien to me." 
 The theory is still, as it always has been, far ahead 
 of the practice; but this only shows for the ten 
 thousandth time that literature has always illum- 
 ined the path upon which life should travel if it is 
 
APPENDIX 89 
 
 to reach the goal of its divine destiny? One thing 
 is absolutely certain: upon every volume in the list 
 the stamp of approval has been placed by many 
 competent judges; in the great major of cases by 
 generations of competent judges. If not all the 
 volumes are ethically the best, they at least repre- 
 sent what we would have been most interested in. 
 The intending reader even though he selects in a 
 somewhat haphazard way can therefore not go amiss. 
 
 Addison's Reger de Coverly. Akers' History of 
 South America. Aeschylus, The Oresteia. 
 Alarcon's Three Cornered Hat; The Scandal. 
 Arnold's Light of Asia. Arnold's Literature 
 and Dogma; Essays in Criticism. Ariosto's 
 Orlando Furioso. Aristotle's Organum; Rhet- 
 oric and Poetic; Ethics; Politics. Aristopha- 
 nes' Comedies, Frere's Translation. Atkinson,s 
 Forty Years in a Moorland Parish. Arabian 
 Nights. Augustin's Confessions; The City of 
 God. Austen's Pride and Prejudice; Sense 
 and Sensibility. Auerbach's Black Forest Vil- 
 lage Tales. 
 
 Bain's or Maudsley's Body and Mind. Bailey's 
 Festus. Bacon's Novum Organum. Bage- 
 hot's Physics and Politics. Balzac's Chouans; 
 The Country Doctor; Pere Goriot; Eugene 
 Grandet. Balfour's Foundation of Belief. 
 Beowulf. Berkeley's Human Knowledge. 
 
90 APPENDIX 
 
 Belcher's Mutineers of the Ship Bounty. 
 Becker's Gallus; Charicles. Beckford's Vathek. 
 Bentley's Phalaris. Bickersteth's Yesterday, 
 To-day and Forever. The Bible. Bjornsen's 
 Sigurd Slembe. Blackmore's Lorna Doone, 
 Blackstone's Commentaries.* Boccacio's De- 
 cameron, in part. BoswelPs Life of Johnson. 
 Borrow's Bible in Spain. Boissier's Cicero 
 and his Friends. Boethius' Consolations of 
 Philosophy. Bryant's Poems. Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's Aurora Leigh; Sonnets from the Portu- 
 guese. Eobert Browning's Red Cotton Night 
 Cap Country; Paracelsus and some shorter 
 Poems; The Ring and the Book. Brown's 
 Edgar Huntley. Browne's Artemus Ward, 
 his Book. Browne's (Sir Thomas) Works, in 
 part Bronte's Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights, f 
 Bryce's Holy Roman Empire. Burton's 
 Anatomy of Melancholy. Butler's Analogy of 
 Religion. Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii; 
 Harold; Eugene Aram. Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
 
 * Undoubtedly the most influential treatise on English law ever 
 written, in spite of some grave defects. When we consider that 
 all progress is based on legislation or is closely connected with it, 
 and that as Hallam says, ' ' We literally live amid the snares and 
 pitfalls of the law," it must be regarded as strange that so few 
 people think it worth while to acquaint themselves with its fun 
 damental principals. See also Kent. 
 
 fCompetent critics have pronounced this the most powerful 
 book ever written by a woman. 
 
APPENDIX 91 
 
 Progress. Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy. 
 Burke's Speeches, in part. Burney's Evelina. 
 Burrough's Pepacton. Buckle's History of 
 Civilization. Burns' Poems, in part. Byron's 
 Poems, in part, but especially Childe Harold. 
 Caesar's Commentaries. Carroll's Alice's Advent- 
 ures in Wonderland. Carlyle's French Revo- 
 lution; Sartor Resartus; Past and Present; 
 Essays. Cable's Old Creole Days; The 
 Grandissimes. Camoen's Lusiad. Campbell's 
 Pleasures of Hope; Gertrude of Wyoming. 
 Cervantes' Don Quixtoe. Chateaubriand's 
 Genius of Christianity; Atala, Rene. Cellini's 
 Autobiography. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. 
 Chesterfield's Letters. Cicero De Officiis. 
 Mrs. Charles' The Schoenberg-Cotta Family. 
 Clemens' (Mark Twain) Roughing It; Innocents 
 Abroad. Coleridge's Poems, in part. Cow- 
 per's Task and Shorter Poems. Cooper's Spy; 
 The Pioneers; The Pilot. Crane's Red Badge 
 of Courage. Creasy 's Fifteen Decisive Battles. 
 Cooke's New Chemistry. Cook's Voyages. 
 Corneille's L'illusion comique, Cid, Horace, 
 Cinna, Polyeucte Cockton's Valentine Vox. 
 Conway's Wandering Jew; Autobiography. 
 Collins' Woman in White. Collins' Odes. 
 Craik's John Halifax. Curtis' The Potiphar 
 Papers; Prue and I. Culture Demanded by 
 Modern Life. Cummins' The Lamplighter. 
 
92 APPENDIX 
 
 Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. Dante's Divina 
 Commedia. Darwin's Origin of Species 
 Daudet's Tarascon; Le Nabab. Day's Sanford 
 and Merton De Quincey's Opium Eater; 
 Miscellaneous Essays. Descartes' Discourse on 
 Method. Demosthenes and Aeschines On the 
 Crown. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. De Vigny's 
 Cinq Mars. De Stael's Germany; Corinne. 
 Dickens' Bleak House; Martin Chuzzlewit; 
 Oliver Twist; David Copperfield. Diogenes 
 Laertius. Disraeli's Coningsby; Lothair. 
 Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature. Doyle's 
 Micah Clarke; Sherlock Holmes. Dryden's 
 Mac flecknoe; the Hind and the Panther; Se- 
 lections from Shorter Poems. Drummond's 
 Tropical Africa. Draper's Intellectual Develop- 
 ment of Europe. Dumas' The Lady with the 
 Camelias. Dumas' the Count of Monte Cristo; 
 The Three Musketeers. Dyer's Gods of Greece. 
 Du Maurier's Trilby. Dymond's Essays. 
 
 Ebers' Uarda; An Egyptian Princess. Edgeworth's 
 Helen; The Absentee. Edwards on the Will. 
 Eliot's Middlemarch; Romola; Silas Marner. 
 Eggleston's Hoosier Schoolmaster. Elson's 
 History of the United States. (Probably the 
 best one volume history.) Epictetus' Morals. 
 Emerson's Essays. Erckmann-Chatrian, Le 
 Conscrit; Waterloo; Madame Therese- Euripides' 
 Medea, the two Iphigeneia, the Phoenicians, 
 
APPENDIX 93 
 
 Alkestis, Hecabe, Helena, Electra, Hercules 
 furens, Ion. Evans' Evolutionary Ethics. 
 
 Finlay's History of Greece, vols. I. II. VI. VII. 
 Fenelon's Telemachus. Fitzgerald's Omar 
 Khayyam. Fielding's Tom Jones. Fiske's 
 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy. Flaubert's 
 Salambo; Mme Bovary. Ford's Janice Mere- 
 dith; the Hon. Peter Stirling. Fox's Journal. 
 Fox's Book of Martyrs. Franklin's Auto- 
 biography. Froissart's Chronicles. Fouque's 
 Undine. Frederic's Theron Ware. Freytag's 
 Debit and Credit; the Lost Manuscript. 
 Fuller's Holy Living and Holy Dying. 
 Fuller's The Cliff Dwellers. 
 
 Galton's Hereditary Genius. Galdos' Dona Perfecta. 
 Gautier's Romance of a Mummy; Cleopatra's 
 Nights. Gardiner's Cromwell's Place in His- 
 tory. Gask ell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. 
 George's Progress and Poverty. Gindeley's 
 History of the Thirty Years War. Gibbon's 
 Decline and Fall. Gneist's English Constitu- 
 tisn. -Goethe's Sorrows of Werther; Goetz; Wil- 
 helm Meiter; Autobiography; Faust; Reineke 
 Fuchs; West-easterly Divan. Godkin's Mod- 
 ern Democracy. Goldsmith's Deserted Village 
 and Traveller; the Vicar of Wakefield. Grant's 
 Memoirs. Greeley's American Conflict. Gro- 
 tius' De jure belli et pacis. Green's Short His- 
 tory of the English People. Gray's Poems. 
 
94 APPENDIX 
 
 Grote's Greece. Guizot's History of Civiliza- 
 tion, more particularly the first volume. 
 
 Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables; the Scarlet 
 Letter; the Marble Faun. Haeckel's History 
 of Creation. Hamerton's Human Intercourse; 
 the Intellectual Life; Harris' Uncle Remus. 
 Hardy's Tess of d'Urbevilles. Hardy's Man- 
 ual of Buddhism. Harte's Luck of Roaring 
 Camp; Early Tales and Tales of the Argonauts. 
 Hay's Castilian Days; Hay and Nicolai's Life 
 of Lincoln. Harper's Code of Hammurabi. 
 Heine's Pictures of Travel and Songs. Hero- 
 dotus. Hilprecht's Explorations in Bible 
 Lands. Hippocrates' Works. Hobbes' Levia- 
 than. Holland's Bittersweet and Kathrina. 
 Howells' Their Wedding Journey; Lady of 
 Aroostook; the Rise of Silas Lapham. Hogg's 
 the Queens Wake. Holmes' Poems, in part; 
 Elsie Venner; Autocrat of the Breakfast Table; 
 the Guardian Angel. Homer's Iliad and 
 Odyssey. Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. 
 Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days. Hume, 
 by T. H. Huxley. Hugo's Les Miserables; 
 Toilers of the Sea; Notre Dame de Paris. 
 Hume's Essays; History of England. Hum- 
 boldt's Cosmos. 
 
 Ibsen's Dramas, in part. Irving's Knickerbocker's 
 History of New .York; Sketch Book; Tales of a 
 Traveller; Astoria. 
 
APPENDIX 95 
 
 James' Americans; Europeans. James' Varieties of 
 Keligious Experience.-Mrs. Jackson's Ramona; 
 a Century of Dishonor. Jebb's Homer. Jew- 
 ett's Deephaven. Jerrold's Mrs. Caudle's Cur- 
 tain Lectures. Jokai's Black Diamonds. 
 Josephus' Wars of the Jews. Jonson's (Ben) 
 Dramas, in part. The Junius Letters. The 
 Satires of Juvenal. 
 
 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason of Practical Rea- 
 son. The Kalevala. Keats' Poems. Thomas 
 a Kempis; The Imitation of Christ. (This is gen- 
 erally held to be the most widely read book 
 next to the Bible.)-Kent's Commentaries. (Of 
 these commentaries it has been said more than 
 once that they have exercised a more potent in- 
 fluence on our national character than any 
 other work.) Keble's Christian Year. Ken- 
 nedy's Swallow Barn; Horseshoe Robinson. 
 Kennan's Tent Life in Siberia. Kingsley's 
 Hypatia; Alton Locke. Kipling's Captains 
 Courageous. Kidd's Social Evolution. Kirk's 
 Life of Charles the Bold. The Koran. 
 
 Landor's Imaginary Conversations, in part. La- 
 fontaine's Fables. Lamb's Essays. La Roche- 
 foucauld's Maxims. Layamon's Brut. Lang- 
 land Piers the Plowman. Lanfrey's Napoleon. 
 Lanier's Poems. Laplace's Mechanism of 
 the Heavens. Letters of Obscure Men. Less- 
 ing's Laokoon; Nathan the Sage; Minna. Le 
 
96 APPENDIX 
 
 Sage's Gil Bias. Lewes' Life of Goethe; History 
 of Philosophy. Lecky's History of England in 
 the 18th Century; History of European Morals; 
 Democracy and Liberty. Lever's Charles 
 O'Malley; Rory O'Moore. Lingard's History 
 of England. Livy's History of Rome, first half. 
 Locke on the Understanding. Lowell's Poems; 
 Among my Books. Longfellow's Poems, in 
 part; Hyperion. Lockhart's Life of Scott. 
 Lover's Handy Andy. Lloyd's Wealth vs. 
 Commonwealth. Lounsbury's History of the 
 English Language. Lubbock's Origin of Civ- 
 ilization. Lucian, Selections from. Lucretius 
 On The Nature of Things. 
 
 Malthus' Essay on Population. Macaulay's History 
 of England; Selected Essays and Lyrics. 
 Marx's Capital. Mather's Magnalia Christi. 
 Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. Martineau's 
 Hour and Man. Manzoni's The Betrothed. 
 Maine's Ancient Law; Early Law and Custom. 
 Mallock's New Republic. Marry at's Master- 
 man Ready. Mahan's Sea Power; Life of 
 Nelson. Maspero's Egypt and Chaldea. The 
 Mabinogion; Lady Guest's Edition. Masson's 
 Life of Milton. Meri vale's History of Rome. 
 Meline's Mary Queen of Scots. Meditations of 
 Marcus Aurelius. Michelet's L' Amour. 
 Miller's My School and Schoolmasters. Mill's 
 or Sigwart's Logic; Autobiography. Milton's 
 
APPENDIX 97 
 
 Paradise Lost and minor poems; the Areopigi- 
 tica. Morgan's Ancient Society. Morley's 
 Gladstone; Voltaire; Diderot. More's Coelebs 
 in Search of a Wife. Montesquieu's Spirit of 
 Laws. More's Utopia.-Mommsen's History of 
 Rome. Montaigne's Essays. Moore's Poems 
 in part. Morris' Earthly Paradise. Moliere's 
 Le Misanthrope, Tartuffe, L' Avare, Les femmes 
 savantes, Les precieuses ridicules. Mueller's 
 Science of Thought. 
 
 Newman's Apologia pro vita sua. Newton's Prin- 
 cipia. The Nibelungen Lied. (There is a 
 good translation by Lettsom, but probably that 
 which is on the whole the most satisfctory is 
 the recent one by Needier). 
 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses, in part. Ossian's Poems. 
 
 Pascal's Thoughts. Paine's Age of Reason.-Pater's 
 Plato and Platonism; Marius the Epicurean.- 
 Patmore's Angel of the House. The Paston 
 Letters. Petrarch's Sonnets. Pearson's Gram- 
 mar of Science. Pindar's Odes. Plautus' 
 Plays. Plato's Apology, Crito and Phaedo; 
 The Republic. (After reading these three dia- 
 logues in order to get an idea of Plato's man- 
 ner, though the first named is not properly a 
 dialogue, most persons will get a clearer insight 
 into the doctrines of Plato from Jowett's Anal- 
 yses and Introduction, than from a translation - 
 of the text). Poe's Poems; Selections from his 
 
98 APPENDIX 
 
 Tales. Plutarch's Lives. Pope's Poems, in 
 part. Polybius' History. Porter's Scottish 
 Chiefs; Thaddeus of Warsaw. 
 
 Quintilian's Institute of Oratory. 
 
 Rabelais' Works. Racine's Britannicus, Mithridate, 
 Iphigenie, Esther, Athalie. Reade's Peg 
 Woffington; Hard Cash; Griffith Gaunt. Re- 
 nan's Life of Jesus. Richter's Titan; Flower, 
 Fruit and Thorn Pieces; Hesperus. Richard- 
 son's Pamela. Roe's Barriers Burned Away. 
 - Rogers' The Economic Interpretation of His- 
 tory. Rousseau's Confessions; Emile. Rus- 
 sell's The Wreck of the Grosvenor. Rydberg's 
 Last Athenian. Ruskin's Modern Painters. 
 
 Sachs' History of Botany. Saintine's Picciola. 
 Saint Simon's Memoirs Saint Pierre's Paul 
 and Virginia. Sallust's Works. Sand's (Geo) 
 Indiana; Consuelo; Lelia. Sappho's Frag- 
 ments.-Mme Sevigne's Detters.-Schopenhauer's 
 World as Will. Scott's Waver ly; Guy Man- 
 nering; Rob Roy; Quentin Durward; Kenil- 
 worth; Poems. Schiller's Poems and Dramas. 
 Seneca's Morals. Seeley's Expansion of 
 England; Life of Stein. Shakspere's Dramas, 
 in part. Shaftsbury's Characteristics. Shep- 
 pard's Charles Auchester. Shelley's Poems. 
 Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein.-Sidney's Arcadia. 
 Sienkiewics' Without Dogma; With Fire and 
 Sword; The Deluge: Pan Michael. Short- 
 
APPENDIX 99 
 
 house's John Inglesant. Smiles' Self Help. 
 Smith's Wealth of Nations. Smith's (Horace 
 and James) Rejected Addresses. Smith's (Sid- 
 ney) Essays. Sophocles' Dramas. Smollett's 
 Roderick Random. Spencer's First Principles; 
 Principles of Sociology; Education; Ethics. 
 Spenser's Fairy Queen. Spinoza's Ethics. 
 Spielhagen's Hammer and Anvil. Stanley's 
 Dark Continent. Stirling's Secret of Hegel. 
 Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Kid- 
 napped. Sterne's Sentimental Journey; Tris- 
 tram Shandy. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin. Stephens' Christianity and Islam. 
 Stepniak, Underground Russia. Strauss' Life 
 of Jesus. Sue's Mysteries of Paris. Suttner's 
 Ground Arms. Swift's Drapier's Letters; Gull- 
 iver's Travels. Swinburne's Miscellaneous 
 Essays; Minor Poems. Symond's Renaissance 
 in Italy. 
 
 Tacitus' Works. Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. 
 Taine's English Literature; The Ancient 
 Regime. Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dy- 
 ing. The Plays of Terence. Tennyson's 
 Poems, in part, but especially In Memoriam. 
 Thackeray's Newcomes; Vanity Fair; Henry 
 Esmond. Thucydides' History of the Pelopon- 
 nesian War. Tegner's Frithiof Saga. Thom- 
 son's Seasons. Thoreau's Walden. Theocri- 
 tus' Idylls. Toy's Judaism and Christianity. 
 
100 APPENDIX 
 
 Tourgee's A Fool's Errand. Trowbridge's 
 Cudjo's Cave. Trumbull's MacFingal. Tol- 
 stoi's My Religion; Anna Karenina; War and 
 Peace; Resurrection. Tupper's Proverbial 
 Philosophy. Turgenieff's Father and Son; 
 Dmitri Rudin; Virgin Soil. TyndalPs Fara- 
 day. Tylor's Early History of Mankind. 
 
 Uhland's Poems. 
 
 Valera's Pepita Ximenez. Virgil's Poems. Vol- 
 taire's Louis XIV and Louis XV; Philosophical 
 Dictionary. 
 
 Walton's Complete Angler. Wallace's Ben Hur- 
 the Prince of India. Wallace's Malay Archi; 
 pelago; Man's Place in Nature. Ward's Rob- 
 ert Ellsmere. Watson's Comte, Mill and 
 Spencer. Ware's Zenobia or Aurelian. Weth- 
 erell's Wide, Wide World. Winsor's Narrative 
 and Critical History.-Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme. 
 Whewell's History of the Industive Sciences. 
 White's Natural History of Selborne. Whit- 
 tier's Poems, in part. Whitman's Poems, in 
 part. Whitney's Life and Growth of Language. 
 Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women. Wood's 
 East Lynne. Wordsworth's Poems, in part. 
 Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson. 
 
 Xenophon's Anabasis, first IV books; Memorabilia 
 of Socrates. 
 
 Yonge's Heir of Redcliffe.-Young's Night Thoughts. 
 Young's Travels in France. 
 
APPENDIX 101 
 
 ZangwilTs Children of the Ghetto. Zola's Germi- 
 nal; La Debacle. 
 
 This list of books will probably make fifteen hun- 
 dred duodecimo volumes of the most usual size and 
 type.* To dispose of the entire collection in fifty 
 years, would require the reading of thirty volumes a 
 year, or about one every fortnight. With many of 
 the volumes this will not be a difficult task, as they 
 require but little reflection. Others in order to be 
 read with profit must be read slowly; still others 
 very slowly. As few persons can give the greater 
 part of their time to reading of a general character, 
 
 '* Few things are commonly more deceptive than the size of a 
 book. Most of the English poets, in fact all of them with very- 
 few exceptions, are issued in a single small volume and also in 
 editions numbering as high as a score of volumes. Yet there is 
 often no more matter in the large edition than in the small. 
 
 The number of authors in the foregoing list is less than four 
 hundred. In this enumeration, the Homeric Poems, the Kalevala, 
 the Bible, the Nibelungen Lied, and similar compilations are for 
 convenience, though inappropriately .attributed to a single author. 
 In several cases a single small work of an author appears on the 
 list. In others, several works by the same author are included; in 
 still others a single work of an author fills several volumes. The 
 number five hundred given on the title-page has therefore only a 
 relative significance, since all the books the title of which are 
 given, would not of necessity fill a hundred volumes. They 
 might indeed be easily printed in fifty of a moderate size. It is 
 believed that no book is named that may not be had in English. 
 
 Paul Otlet, the Secretary of the Brussels International Institute, 
 estimates the whole number of books printed to Jan. 1, 1900, at 
 12,163,000; the number of periodicals at between fifteen and 
 eighteen millions. 
 
102 APPENDIX 
 
 but must devote much of it to professional books, 
 it will be too much for any one person to accom- 
 plish. It will also be necessary to read more or less 
 current matter, not for culture but for information. 
 
 Moreover, as very few of the volumes deal with 
 the plastic or pictorial arts, those who are interested 
 in these subjects must find their reading outside of 
 the list. The omission is intentional, for the rea- 
 son that I do not believe anyone can get much pro- 
 fit from the mere perusal of books, but must know 
 something of the arts themselves. The same state- 
 ment will apply also to music. The list has of 
 course no significance to the specialist, as he is 
 under the necessity of reading a great deal that 
 bears directly on the subject in which he is 
 directly interested. The specialist, moreover, can 
 dispose of a very large number of volumes in a very 
 short time, as only once in a while does he come 
 across one that adds materially to his knowledge. 
 
 In order to place before my readers the best 
 method of using the list of books like the foregoing, 
 I will put my suggestions in the form of a narative. 
 
 In the town of N there lived about a score 
 
 of persons of fair education who were sincerly de- 
 sirous to promote their mental culture. Realizing 
 the utter imposibility of even looking into the cur- 
 rent issues of the press either in the shape of books 
 or periodicals, they decided to confine themselves 
 chiefly to the world's masterpieces. 
 
APPENDIX 103 
 
 They met about twenty times a year. Every 
 Fall, a committee selected for the purpose assigned 
 to each person the books or work he was to purchase, 
 the annual cost being about five dollars per mem- 
 ber. During the year each member read and re- 
 ported to the club the contents of his allotment, 
 three or four reporting at each meeting. In the 
 case of poetry where the form is essential, selections 
 were read instead of the usual reports. In the case 
 of small books a report occupied less than half an 
 hour; in the case of larger ones much longer. 
 Sometimes a report occupied part of several even- 
 ings. As each meeting lasted about three hours, 
 each member in the course of a year became some- 
 what familiar with the contents of two or three 
 scores of volumes and knew at first hand about a 
 dozen. The reports were usually made in writing 
 or from notes in order to secure accuracy and fore- 
 stall rambling talk. No book was to be brought 
 to the attention of the club unless it had stood the 
 test of time or had attracted widespread attention. 
 
 This plan proved entirely feasible, entailed but 
 little cost on each member, did not interfere with 
 any one's business or professional reading, and 
 proved a great saving of time. As all the books 
 were the property of some member, he naturally felt 
 an interest in their preservation, and little time was 
 wasted in looking for the volume wanted. 
 
 There was rarely any of the desultory and aimless 
 
104 APPENDIX 
 
 discussion by which clubs having a similar object, 
 fritter away the passing hours. As the purpose was 
 to study the great writers, the members rarely felt 
 called upon to give their own opinions. How long 
 the club has been in existence I do not know, but 
 it is easy to see that it can be made perpetual. 
 
 It is an unfortunate feature of the management 
 of not a few public libraries that for the most part 
 those books are bought which the patrons want 
 rather than those which they need. Generally 
 speaking, the books called for are not those that 
 ought to be called for. The first purpose of a public 
 library, far and away, is to instruct; but no harm 
 will be done if it also entertains. Neither libraries 
 nor life ought to be taken too seriously. 
 
 Albeit, if a book or a collection of books is to edu- 
 cate, its contents must always be out of the easy 
 reach of the reader; he should always be compelled 
 to stretch himself somewhat intellectually to rise to 
 its level. A library should either take the place of 
 a course of study or supplement it. The subjects 
 and text-books of a course of study are always so 
 arranged that the mind of the student is kept in 
 tension in trying to master what is before him. 
 The mind, like the body, is trained by vigorous ex- 
 ercise. While therefore the text-books of the fourth 
 or fifth year may be just as difficult for the student 
 of this grade, the text-book used by first year stu- 
 dents should appear easy to him even when he 
 
APPENDIX 105 
 
 takes them in hand for the first time. 
 
 Nobody would be in favor of delegating to a com- 
 pany of boys and girls the elaboration of a course 
 of study; yet not a few persons are willing to leave 
 the question to a miscellaneous public, as to what 
 books should be placed in a public library. Such 
 a library is no more a matter for every body to 
 have a hand in than is the public school. Neither 
 is good for much where even a considerable minor- 
 ity of the patrons must be consulted as to the man- 
 agement. 
 
 THE END. 
 
NORTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 Bldg. 400, Richmond Field Station 
 University of California 
 Richmond, CA 94804-4698 
 
 BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 !-month loans may be renewed by calling 
 
 (510)642-6753 
 -year loans may be recharged by bringing books 
 
 to NRLF 
 Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days 
 
 prior to due date 
 
 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW 
 
04105