swallow," is the only introduction,--and so,
many a one turns and runs frightened from the feast.

This intolerant mode of teaching the classical languages is peculiar to
them alone. Multitudes of girls and boys are learning to read and to
speak German, French, and Italian, and to feel all the delights of
expatiating in the literature of a new language, purely because of a
simpler, more natural, less pedantic mode of teaching these languages.

Intolerance in the established system of education works misery in
families, because family pride decrees that every boy of good status in
society, will he, nill he, shall go through college, or he almost
forfeits his position as a gentleman.

"Not go to Cambridge!" says Scholasticus to his first-born. "Why, I went
there,--and my father, and his father, and his father before him. Look
at the Cambridge Catalogue and you will see the names of our family ever
since the College was founded!"

"But I can't learn Latin and Greek," says young Scholasticus. "I can't
remember all those rules and exceptions. I've tried, and I can't. If you
could only know how my head feels when I try! And I won't be at the foot
of the class all the time, if I have to get my living by digging."

Suppose, now, the boy is pushed on at the point of the bayonet to a kind
of knowledge in which he has no interest, communicated in a way that
requires faculties which Nature has not given him,--what occurs?

He goes through his course, either shamming, shirking, parrying, all the
while consciously discredited and dishonored,--or else putting forth an
effort that is a draft on all his nervous energy, he makes merely a
decent scholar, and loses his health for life.

Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical
education,--if it were admitted that the great object is to read and
enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few
things absolutely essential to this result,--if the tortoise were
allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to
swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon,--all might in
their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and
its coolness.

"But," say the advocates of the present system, "it is good mental
discipline."

I doubt it. It is mere waste of time.

When a boy has learned that in the genitive plural of the first
declension of Greek nouns the final syllable is circumflexed, bu