school for business is business itself-the railway shop, the store, the factory, or the bank. "Business colleges," good, bad, or indifferent, abound in our country, and recently Harvard and other universities have thought fit to establish "Schools of Business Administration" and what-not else of the same character. A deplorable misconception-I am bold enough to say it-of the true functions of a university. We need ideals in our country. Shall we print the dollar sign on our Bachelor's degrees and flatter their holders into the vain belief that they are better equipped for money-earning because they have spent less time in learning lessons that mean vastly more for the inner life?

I have still to hear of the young man whose theoretical knowledge of bookkeeping and finance and international exchange secured him better pay, or a position of greater trust, than that given the lad from the public school. A level-headed college graduate is better worth his pay than a fellow who comes from a business college with his head full of dummy exchange operations and makebelieve entries on a ledger.

An old friend of mine, who fought in the Civil War, and who still clings fondly to the high-protection fallacy, once said to me, when I had just entered business in 1888, "My dear boy, you know more in theory today than you are likely ever to know in practice." My young graduate pride rebelled at this, but thirteen years' experience in very active affairs taught me that the time spent at Harvard studying history of finance, political economy, and international law might as well have been devoted to the classics for all the practical value I got out of those worldlier pursuits.

The great and legitimate aim of a business man is to

make money, to provide for himself and his family such luxuries and comforts as his tastes and social standing demand. But when a man has reached the goal of his desires, when he has made his pile and desires to enjoy it, then comes the time for the making of the real and only balance sheet. Then he must ask himself, "What are my resources, now that I have everything that money can buy? What are my spiritual and intellectual assets? How can I best spend what is left to me of life?" Lucky is the man whose early training fits him for something more than the golf-field, or the tennis-court, and for something better than the gaming-table when his days of business activity are over. He can taste the gentler pleasures that await him in his study and by the blazing hearth-fire. His Sophocles or his Plato, his Catullus or his Cicero, will make the winter of life seem like its early spring when the greatest struggle he knew was with the elusive rules of grammar and syntax. This busy world of ours cannot stop: it will always whirl and rush and hustle. But some of us- -and the more the bettermust learn that on one side of the rushing stream of life lie the peaceful backwaters, in which the clouds and the sun, the shrubs and the birds of the air appear reflected in their true, undistorted image, gently floating on the limpid pool of reverie.

man.

3. FROM WILLIAM SLOANE President of W. and J. Sloane, New York

A classical education is a large asset for any business His equipment for his life work is that much better, and will prove to be so in increasing measure as he rises to positions of responsibility and influence in his business and elsewhere. A wider horizon means greater ability to see through complex situations, to understand motives,

to measure men; to say nothing of the more intelligent interest he may be enabled to take in those outside matters which increase general culture in the community, in the state, and in the nation.

An American man of affairs is hardly in the same category with the old-world shopkeeper. He must be well prepared to serve his day and generation in a great variety of ways. He may be called from the counter to the cabinet. The only limitations to success in America are those of capacity. But the great trouble with us is that we are forever looking for the short cut. This characteristic has caused a lack of thoroughness in our educational system which is unfortunate. If a man can skim over history and economics, and a modern language or two, and secure a college degree, he is ill prepared to perform in business the drudgery of an apprenticeship, which after all constitutes the only basis on which to build. I believe that the slow processes of translation of the classics (which in my opinion should be compulsory in the academic course for a B.A. degree) make good training for the boy who has chosen a business career. This is entirely aside from the advantage, which he will never enjoy again, of communing with the gods. The business man's day is prosaic, the men he meets are, as a rule, men of little or no schooling. The business principles he finds are not always in accord with his preconceived ideas of honesty; there isn't much art or poetry in it all; and unless he has something to fall back upon, some background to his life and thought, some such continual source of quiet comfort and pleasure as a classical education will afford him, life will be a very empty thing; while business cares and business successes will become such paramount issues with him that the man will be lost in his pursuits.

Again, a business man who has had a classical education cannot fail to remember with reverence and affection those patient, consecrated men who taught him Latin and Greek, and awoke in him a love for the beautiful. Such men as these, with ideals, he perhaps no longer meets in his daily vocation. With the passing years he may have forgotten the very names of the classics he read at college, but the memory of those days, of those men, of their enthusiasm in their work, has had its effect on the man himself and he is better for it, and I believe a better business man, too, for unconsciously he has acquired something which he values as a precious possession, a something which distinguishes him from his fellows and makes him singularly happy in his work.

II. THE STUDY OF THE CLASSICS AS A TRAINING
FOR MEN OF AFFAIRS

THE HONORABLE JOHN W. FOSTER
Washington, D.C.

My experience in the practice of law and my observation of public affairs have led me to look with regret upon the diminishing interest in our higher institutions of learning in the study of the ancient classics. The modern university spirit seems to tend to the elective system and to study in the scientific and more practical departments of knowledge. I doubt very much whether it is wisest to leave entirely to the immature youth the selection of his course of study. So also it may be better to train and develop the mind in the earlier years than to store it with knowledge, which may well come later. If the university is to maintain its proper place as the seat of higher learning, Greek and Latin should not be rele

gated to an unimportant position in the curriculum, nor their study discouraged.

History tells us of the unequaled refinement of the Greek race in the days of Pericles. Only a few doubtful and imperfect specimens of the chisel of Phidias and his school remain, and the skill of Apelles' brush is entirely lost to us; but the highest evidence of the art, refinement, and thought of that golden age has come down to us unimpaired in the Greek language, the most perfect achievement of the human race. No better training for the youthful mind can be devised than the study of this language and the mastery of the high and polished thoughts which it has preserved. It matters not if, in the resistless hurry of our practical age, the Greek which we acquired in our youth passes from our memory; its influence on the mind will never be obliterated.

Lord Brougham, one of the first of English statesmen and scholars of the last century, in his inaugural address as rector of Glasgow University, said:

Be ye assured that the works of the English chisel fall not more short of the wonders of the Acropolis, than the best productions of modern pens fall short of the chaste, finished, nervous, and overwhelming compositions of the Greeks. Be equally sure that, with hardly an exception, the great things of poetry and of eloquence have been done by men who have cultivated the mighty exemplars of Athenian genius with daily and with nightly devotion.

Also that other distinguished English statesman and scholar, than whom no one of his generation was greater master of his own language, Gladstone, wrote:

The modern European civilization from the Middle Ages downward is the compound of two factors-the Christian religion for the soul of man and the Greek discipline for his mind and intellect.