e
overgrowth of courses in government and sociology, which send men into the
world skilled in the machinery of statecraft and with minds sharpened to
the immediate demands of special groups, but with no genuine training of
the imagination and no understanding of the longer problems of humanity,
with no hold on the past, "amidst so vast a fluctuation of passions and
opinions, to concentre their thoughts, to ballast their conduct, to
preserve them from being blown about by every wind of fashionable
doctrine." It will set itself against any regular subjection of the
"fierce spirit of liberty," which is the breath of distinction and the
very charter of aristocracy, to the sullen spirit of equality, which
proceeds from envy in the baser sort of democracy. It will regard the
character of education and the disposition of the curriculum as a question
of supreme importance; for its motto is always, _abeunt studia in mores_.

Now this aristocratic principle has, so to speak, its everlasting
embodiment in Greek literature, from whence it was taken over into Latin
and transmitted, with much mingling of foreign and even contradictory
ideas, to the modern world. From Homer to the last runnings of the
Hellenic spirit you will find it taught by every kind of precept and
enforced by every kind of example; nor was Shakespeare writing at hazard,
but under the instinctive guidance of genius, when he put his aristocratic
creed into the mouth of the hero who to the end remained for the Greeks
the personification of their peculiar wisdom. In no other poetry of the
world is the law of distinction, as springing from a man's perception of
his place in the great hierarchy of privilege and obligation, from the
lowest human being up to the Olympian gods, so copiously and magnificently
set forth as in Pindar's _Odes of Victory_. And AEschylus was the first
dramatist to see with clear vision the primacy of the intellect in the law
of orderly development, seemingly at variance with the divine immutable
will of Fate, yet finally in mysterious accord with it. When the
philosophers of the later period came to the creation of systematic
ethics, they had only the task of formulating what was already latent in
the poets and historians of their land; and it was the recollection of the
fulness of such instruction in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ and the Platonic
Dialogues, with their echo in the _Officia_ of Cicero, as if in them were
stored up all the treasures of