highest.  Think of that boundless devotion to the State as an omnipotent and all-absorbing power, superseding morality and suppressing the individual, which within the short span of two generations has taken possession of Germany.  In the latter case at least the incessant preaching and teaching of a theory which lowers the citizen’s independence and individuality while it saps his moral sense seems to us a misdirection of educational effort.  But in it education has at least displayed its power.

Can a fair statement of the educational ideals which we might here and now set before ourselves be found in saying that there are three chief aims to be sought as respects those we have called the best minds?

One aim is to fit men to be at least explorers, even if not discoverers, in the fields of science and learning.

A second is to fit them to be leaders in the field of action, leaders not only by their initiative and their diligence, but also by the power and the habit of turning a full stream of thought and knowledge upon whatever work they have to do.

A third is to give them the taste for, and the habit of enjoying, intellectual pleasures.

Many moralists, ancient and modern, have given pleasure a bad name, because they saw that the most alluring and powerfully seductive pleasures, pleasures which appeal to all men alike, were indulged to excess, and became a source of evil.  But men will have pleasure and ought to have pleasure.  The best way of drawing them off from the more dangerous pleasures is to teach them to enjoy the better kinds.  Moreover the quieter pleasures of the intellect mean Rest, and a greater fitness for resuming work.

The pity is that so many sources capable of affording delight are ignored or imperfectly appreciated.  May not this be partly the fault of the lines which our education has followed?  Perhaps some kinds of study would have fared better if their defenders had dwelt more upon the pleasure they afford and less upon their supposed utility.  The champions of Greek and Latin have dilated on the value of grammar as a mental discipline, and argued that the best way to acquire a good English style is to know the ancient languages, a proposition discredited by many examples to the contrary.  It is really this insistence on grammatical minutiae that has proved repellent to young people and suggested the dictum that “it doesn’t much matter what you teach a boy so long as he hates it.”  Better had it been, abandoning the notion that every one should learn Greek, to dwell upon the boundless pleasure which minds of imagination and literary taste derive from carrying in memory the gems of ancient wisdom which are more easily remembered because they are not in our own language, and the finest passages of ancient poetry.  There are plenty of things—­indeed there are far more things—­in modern literature as noble and as beautiful as the best of the ancients can give us.  But they are not the same things.