If you are going to put yourself forward as an authority, however, you must round out your knowledge of the facts by extending it beyond your own personal experience.  If it is a question of entrance requirements, you cannot stop with your own experience, or even with that of your own class at school.  You must go back to the records of a number of classes before and perhaps after your own, and talk them over with the principal of the school, to see whether there are any special circumstances which affect any of them.  If you are arguing for or against a change in the present rules of football, you would have to go beyond the games of your own college team, and beyond those of the present season.  If, for example, it were a question of amending the rules concerning the forward pass, you could not speak with full authority unless you had looked up the accounts of the principal games for two or three years at any rate.  If you put yourself forward, then, as a witness on one of these cases of complicated facts, you must make it clear to your readers that you have a right to be considered such.  If you have the right, it would be folly to hide your light under a bushel.

An example of the care which is taken by men who have made themselves authorities on their subjects is to be found in the following passage from President Eliot’s address, “A Wider Range of Electives in College Admission Requirements."[21] Notice how broad a basis he lays for his conclusions both in facts and in the opinions of other authorities.  What should be the grounds of a just valuation of all the subjects that can be presented at admission examinations which include numerous options?

That question introduces us to a difficult inquiry.  It is, of course, not an intelligent method to attribute a value to each subject in accordance with the time devoted to the examination in that subject.  What clue have we toward a better mode of determining the value which ought to be attributed to each of the numerous electives, when the young men cannot present all the permitted subjects, and hardly three fifths of them, indeed, if the range is adequately widened?  I believe that the best criterion for determining the value of each subject is the time devoted to that subject in schools which have an intelligent program of studies.  The Committee of Ten[22] examined the number of subjects used in about two hundred of the best secondary schools in this country, and the time-allotments for the several subjects.  They found a great variety of practice as to both selection of subjects and time-allotments.  You can hardly say that there is an accepted time-allotment in these secondary schools for any subject—­not even for the old traditional subjects.  The time-allotments differ widely in different parts of the country, and even in different schools in the same part of the country.  If, then, we are to determine by school time-allotments the valuations of the different subjects, prescribed