nd in the successful engineer or business
man than in the scholar of secluded habits, and because often such men of
affairs received no discipline at college in the classics, the argument
runs that utilitarian studies are as disciplinary as the humanistic. But
efficiency of this kind is not an academic product at all, and is commonly
developed, and should be developed, in the school of the world. It comes
from dealing with men in matters of large physical moment, and may exist
with a mind utterly undisciplined in the stricter sense of the word. We
have had more than one illustrious example in recent years of men capable
of dominating their fellows, let us say in financial transactions, who
yet, in the grasp of first principles and in the analysis of consequences,
have shown themselves to be as inefficient as children.

Probably, however, few men who have had experience in education will deny
the value of discipline to the classics, even though they hold that other
studies, less costly from the utilitarian point of view, are equally
educative in this respect. But it is further of prime importance, even if
such an equality, or approach to equality, were granted, that we should
select one group of studies, and unite in making it the core of the
curriculum for the great mass of undergraduates. It is true in education
as in other matters that strength comes from union, and weakness from
division, and if educated men are to work together for a common end, they
must have a common range of ideas, with a certain solidarity in their way
of looking at things. As matters actually are, the educated man feels
terribly his isolation under the scattering of intellectual pursuits, yet
too often lacks the courage to deny the strange popular fallacy that there
is virtue in sheer variety, and that somehow well-being is to be struck
out from the clashing of miscellaneous interests rather than from
concentration. In one of his annual reports some years ago President
Eliot, of Harvard, observed from the figures of registration that the
majority of students still at that time believed the best form of
education for them was in the old humanistic courses, and _therefore_, he
argued, the other courses should be fostered. There was never perhaps a
more extraordinary syllogism since the _argal_ of Shakespeare's
gravedigger. I quote from memory, and may slightly misrepresent the actual
statement of the influential "educationalist," but the spirit of