If languages are treated not as lessons but as vehicles of speech, and if the authors are read so that we may find out what they say and how they say it, and at such a pace that we follow the train of thought or the story, all who have any sense of language at all can attend and with pleasure too.  What chance has a boy of enjoying an author when he knows him only as a task to be droned through, thirty lines at a time?  Small blame to the pupil who never discovers that the great authors were men of like passions with ourselves, that the Homeric songs were made to be shouted at feasts to heroes full of drink and glory, that Herodotus is telling of wonders that his friends, and we too, want to hear, that in the tragedies we hear the voice of Sophocles dictating, choked with emotion and tears; that even Roman historians wrote because they had something to tell, and Caesar, dull proser that he is, composed the Commentaries not to provide us with style or grammatical curiosities, but as a record of extraordinary events.  To get into touch with any author he must be read at a good pace, and by reading of that kind there is plenty of time for a boy before he reaches 17 to make acquaintance with much of the best literature both of Greek and Latin.

Education must be brought up to date; but if in accomplishing that, we lose Greek, it will have been sacrificed to obstinate formalism and pedagogic tradition.  The defence of classics as a basis of education is generally misrepresented by opponents.  The unique value of the classics is not in any begetting of literary style.  We are thinking of readers not of writers.  Much of the best literature is the work of unlettered men, as they never tire of telling us, but it is for the enjoyment and understanding of books and of the world that continuity with the past should be maintained.  John Bunyan wrote sterling prose, knowing no language but his own.  But how much could he read?  What judgments could he form?  We want also to keep classics and especially Greek as the bountiful source of material and of colour, decoration for the jejune lives of common men.  If classics cease to be generally taught and become the appanage of a few scholars, the gulf between the literary and the scientific will be made still wider.  Milton will need more explanatory notes than O. Henry.  Who will trouble about us scientific students then?  We shall be marked off from the beginning, and in the world of laboratories Hector, Antigone and Pericles will soon share the fate of poor Ananias and Sapphira.

I come now to the gravest part of the whole question.  We plead for the preservation of literature, especially classical literature, as the staple of education in the name of beauty and understanding:  but no less do we demand science in the name of truth and advancement.  Given that our demand succeeds, what consequences may we expect?  Nothing immediate, as I fear.  In opening the discussion it was argued