national power of thinking will not be impaired if it is deprived of the teaching of the most thoughtful nation which the world has ever known.  That nation is Greece.  These classes, therefore, lift up their hands in supplication to scientists, educational experts, and parliamentarians—­yea, even to soulless wire-pullers who would perhaps willingly cast Homer and Sophocles to the dogs in order to win a contested election—­and with one voice cry:  We recognise the need of reform; we wish to march with the times; we are no enemies to science; but in the midst of your utilitarian ideas, we implore you, in the name both of learning and common sense, to devise some scheme which will still enable the humanities to act as some check on the growing materialism of the age; otherwise the last stage of the educated youth of this country will be worse than the first; remember what Lucretius—­on the bold assumption that wire-pullers ever read Lucretius—­said, “Hic Acherusia stultorum denique vita”; above all things, let there be no panic legislation—­and panic is a danger to which democracies and even, Pindar has told us, “the sons of the gods,"[91] are greatly exposed; in taking any new departure let us, therefore, very carefully and deliberately consider how we can best preserve all that is good in our existing system.

Whatever temporary effect appeals of this sort may produce, it is certain that the ultimate result must depend very greatly on the extent to which a real interest in classical literature can be kept alive in the minds of the rising and of future generations.  How can this object best be achieved?  The question is one of vital importance.

The writer of the present article would be the last to attempt to raise a cheap laugh at the expense of that laborious and, as it may appear to some, almost useless erudition which, for instance, led Professor Hermann to write four books on the particle [Greek:  an] and to indite a learned dissertation on [Greek:  autos].  The combination of industry and enthusiasm displayed in efforts such as these has not been wasted.  The spirit which inspired them has materially contributed to the real stock of valuable knowledge which the world possesses.  None the less it must be admitted that something more than mere erudition is required to conjure away the perils which the humanities now have to face.  It is necessary to quicken the interest of the rising generation, to show them that it is not only historically true to say, with Lessing, that “with Greece the morning broke,” but that it is equally true to maintain that in what may, relatively speaking, be called the midday splendour of learning, we cannot dispense with the guiding light of the early morn; that Greek literature, in Professor Gilbert Murray’s words,[92] is “an embodiment of the progressive spirit, an expression of the struggle of the human soul towards freedom and ennoblement”; and that our young men and women will be, both morally and intellectually, the poorer if they listen to the insidious and deceptive voice of an exaggerated materialism which whispers that amidst the hum of modern machinery and the heated wrangles incident to the perplexing problems which arise as the world grows older, the knowledge of a language and a literature which have survived two thousand eight hundred storm-tossed years is “of no practical use.”