“Latin is the foundation of so much in the written and spoken language of modern Europe, that it is the best language to take as a second language; in our own written and book language, above all, it fills so large a part that we perhaps hardly know how much of their reading falls meaningless upon the eye and ear of children in our elementary schools, from their total ignorance of either Latin or a modern language derived from it.  For the little of languages that can be taught in our elementary schools, it is far better to go to the root at once; and Latin, besides, is the best of all languages to learn grammar by.  But it should by no means be taught as in our classical schools; far less time should be spent on the grammatical framework, and classical literature should be left quite out of view.  A second language, and a language coming very largely into the vocabulary of modern nations, is what Latin should stand for to the teacher of an elementary school.  I am convinced that for his purpose the best way would be to disregard classical Latin entirely, to use neither Cornelius Nepos, nor Eutropius, nor Caesar, nor any delectus from them, but to use the Latin Bible, the Vulgate.  A chapter or two from the story of Joseph, a chapter or two from Deuteronomy, and the first two chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel would be the sort of delectus we want; add to them a vocabulary and a simple grammar of the main forms of the Latin language, and you have a perfectly compact and cheap school book, and yet all that you need.  In the extracts the child would be at home, instead of, as in extracts from classical Latin, in an utterly strange land; and the Latin of the Vulgate, while it is real and living Latin, is yet, like the Greek of the New Testament, much nearer to modern idiom, and therefore much easier for a modern learner than classical idiom can be.  True, a child whose delectus is taken from Cornelius Nepos or Caesar will be better prepared perhaps for going on to Virgil and Cicero than a child whose delectus is taken from the Vulgate.  But we do not want to carry our elementary schools into Virgil or Cicero; one child in five thousand, with a special talent, may go on to higher schools, and to Virgil, and he will go on to them all the better for the little we have at any rate given him.  But what we want to give to our Elementary Schools in general is the vocabulary, to some extent, of a second language, and that language one which is at the bottom of a great deal of modern life and modern language.  This, I am convinced, we may give in some such method as the method I have above suggested, but in no other.”