Germany and France, to a lesser degree in Great Britain, and to a still lesser degree in the United States, we find, however, an anomalous condition of things. In each of these countries civilization has long since passed into an unprecedented phase, and each of these countries has long since developed a great living mass of literature in which its new problems are, at any rate, approached. There is scarcely a work left in Latin or Greek that has not been translated into and assimilated and more or less completely superseded by English, French, and German works; but the schoolmaster, heedless of these things, still arrests the pupil at the old portal, fumbles with the keys, and partially opens the door into a ransacked treasure-chamber. The language of literature and of civilized ideas is, for the English-speaking world to-day, English—not the weak, spoken dialect of each class and locality, but the rich and splendid language in which and with which our literature and philosophy grow. That, however, is by the way. Our point at present is that the exhaustive teaching of a language so that it may serve as a key to culture is a second function in the school.
We find in a broad survey of schools in general that there has also been a disposition to develop a special training in thought and expression either in the mother tongue (as in the Roman schools of Latin oratory), or in the culture tongue (as in Roman schools of Greek oratory), and we find the same element in the mediaeval trivium. Quintilian’s conception of education, the reader will remember, was oratory. This aspect of school work was the traditional and logical development of the culture language-teaching. But as in Europe the culture language has ceased to be really a culture language but merely a reasonless survival, and its teaching has degenerated more and more into elaborate formalities supposed to have in some mystical way “high educational value,” and for the most part conducted by men unable either to write or speak the culture language with any freedom or vigour, this crown of cultivated expression has become more and more inaccessible. It is too manifestly stupid—even for our public schoolmasters—to think of carrying the