any courses for the last two years in preference to giving the student full range for the exercise of his preferences? The reply to these questions might be given with an indefinite amount of detail. This whole question, like nearly all those questions which most perplex our human life, is one of drawing lines and making distinctions. Probably all will admit that lines must be drawn somewhere. There comes a time, that is to say, when the boy may be left more and more to direct himself,—as in other matters, so in the subject-matter of his education. But for years the boy, in order to learn how to study and how to make right choice of what he will study, must be kept in prescribed lines. Infants cannot decide whether they will learn to read or not. Small boys cannot be left wholly to decide whether they will study grammar and arithmetic. Older boys and youths and young men, whatever they undertake in the education of themselves, find a great fund of previous experience and established custom hemming them in and restricting their perfectly free choice. The average college freshman ought not to desire, and he is not capable of exercising, such choice in so grave a problem as that of determining all the further subject-matter of his education.
In the matter of assuming full political rights and privileges the State requires the youth to have reached the age of twenty-one. I do not suppose
