logical courses, for along those lines missionary work is pushed, and the workers receive the reward which they regard more than they do money. When shopwork and engineering come to be held in high honor among missionaries, the technical schools connected with state universities will have their share of men preparing for usefulness. When that time arrives there will be no more insinuation that the technical school lessens respect for principle and weakens fineness of sentiment. At the same time, it may be remarked that labeling a man as selfish or without the finer sentiments, simply because he is unwilling to become a foreign missionary, seems to be a somewhat audacious assumption of the Divine prerogative.
But how does this question of the technical school concern the observance or neglect of classical studies in the college course? Not in any wise. Classical studies have not been thrust out of the technical school, for they never were in it; they have no proper place there any more than in schools of law or medicine. Whether or not prolonged classical training is desirable for those who can afford the college course prior to beginning preparation for life's work is certainly deserving of serious consideration; and there must be much to be said on both sides—otherwise, the discussion would not be intense as at present. It may be that classical training, as imparted in American colleges, is the best or even the only means of turning the youthful mind to high ideals—but the writer hesitates to accept the proposition. He underwent a very severe course of classical training from his sixth to his twenty-second year, yet his memory, by no means frail, does not recall "the great classical ideals of self-sacrifice" with which, one must suppose, modern ideals fade into insignificance. Nor has this conception of classical training been accepted always as axiomatic. The writer remembers an earnest discussion by several professors of theology at his father's table, about fifty-five years ago, in which those excellent men lamented the degrading influence of the classical authors read in college—the same, by the way, as those read now. And doubtless some of those reading this article will remember the efforts made by good men to counteract this evil influence by the preparation of works in classical Latin, dealing with the life of George Washington and other harmless topics. The writer, however, has never been able to share those fears. His general impression respecting the classical authors, which seemed to be that of his fellow students, was that those writers prepared their works chiefly to provide sentences with which Zumpt and Kühner might illustrate the perplexities of syntax and prosody.
