and not Latin grammar that is used. The reason why the child should say 'I am taller than he' is, if a reason must be given, that than is historically identical with then, not that 'quam takes the same case after it as before it.'

If we could only keep our eyes steadily fixed on the goal and discard formalism, tradition, and antiquated examinations, there is in the work of the best infants' and elementary schools a broad enough base for us to build a sound structure of English up to the university and beyond. Perhaps some day a progressive university may try the experiment of an English Arts Course in which the first part would consist solely of Advanced Reading and Writing, and the second part of options between English Philosophy, English Philology, English Poetics, or English Criticism. It need not be any lower in standard than an Oxford Greats course.

We could not well spare the scholars. On the contrary, those who believe with me that English contains all 'things necessary to culture will be most anxious to enlist for its service the finest scholarship of the day. Some will think the fare provided in such a course as I have outlined too rich in sugar or fat and wanting in the tougher constituents which produce bone and muscle. It is essential to require more and more precision and accuracy as the child passes through the phases of adolescence. We must contemplate something very like the best of classical teaching applied to English Classics for big boys and girls.

I write as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel. A man like Robert Whitelaw loved the literature of Greece and Rome with such devotion that its very forms were sacred to him. A false quantity or a false concord was to him a personal affront: it caused him physical pain.

Accents and particles mattered to him and so they mattered to us. There was a right and a wrong. We did not understand why, but we knew and felt his scorn of anything careless or superficial. He read Sophocles aloud with an intensity that at first puzzled and then infected us. Occasionally, but all too rarely, it was his task to do the same with Chaucer or Browning. Why not?

But at this point I labor with a sense of unreality. Is it possible to capture for our language a tithe of that old classical fervor? We have buried our Grammarian upon his peak, fronting the sunrise. He settled hoti's business. I have heard him lecture for an hour upon the future sense of the optative with an enthusiasm that was drawn from some pure source in the depths. Doubtless he survives in disciples. Is it the mere mystery and power of the Word that inspires them? I will not believe that it is any inherent virtue possessed by Propertius but denied to Shelley that inspires the classical scholar.

But where are our inspired teachers of English? I have an impression of critical, quizzical gentlemen, deeply learned in Elizabethan drama or Saxon dialect, but all the same terribly mild. I cannot picture one of their disciples seriously moved by a misplaced ‘and which' or an unrelated participle in English. Something is missing.

There are thousands of genuine lovers of English literature scattered up and down the country, people who feel the thrill of delight in verbal beauty quite as keenly as any classical scholar. But they want leaders and a voice. We suffer our fools too gladly in English studies. Any lunatic is allowed to criticize, traduce, misinterpret Dryden, Carlyle, Addison, even Shakespeare, as if they were our private playthings. They are not. They are

worthy of their pedestals of worship just as much as Homer and Aristotle. The issue of the war has established more firmly than ever the predominance of the English language in the world. If our schools would rise to their opportunity and raise English into a culture worthy of its qualities there seems no reason why it should not become the universal medium of civilization for the world. The richThe London Mercury

ness and variety of its literature, and the simplicity and flexibility of its structure render it, as a language, amply sufficient. Whether this is visionary or not, it is no longer safe for those who cherish the humanities in education to rely upon the old impregnable position of Latin and Greek. The world has received one of those secular shocks in which tradition crumbles to dust.

ARE WE HAPPIER THAN OUR

FATHERS?

BY RICHARD WHITEING

THE posterity of Adam have been busy with an answer to this question from the beginning of time. Their progenitor is the only exception, because he had no starting point for the comparison. Old Hesiod was quite concerned about it, well-nigh three thousand years ago, but found it as elusive as the will-o'-the-wisp. He could only credit his generation with an age of iron, and grizzle over their want of luck. None of them could trace in the almanacs an Age of Gold, when everything was 'just so.' Carlyle gave it up when he erased Happiness from the reckoning, and put Blessedness in its place. Yet the happiness they all had in their minds was nothing out of the way, but only a right good time.

Later Greece was disposed to start it with Hesiod, in spite of him, but he certainly would have declined the honor. Rome put in a claim with the Fathers of the Republic-plain living, high thinking, a joint for a friend, with a drop of something warm in good red wine to wash it down, all grown in your own fields. Our own optimists thought that it had come at last, with Victoria in her prime. This pleasing concept held the field well-nigh until the outbreak of the World War of today. That event has sobered us a little, yet until the last Budget night many were quite ready to believe that it was here with the Peace.

This, of course, changes the venue from backward to forward, and there is some excuse for it. What more can anybody want than what we are going to receive the day after to-morrow? Only think of the improvements! The telephone for talks with continents, instead of with the neighboring plot on

the other side of the garden wall. The style of it! The very concerts and plays brought to your bedside to lull you to sleep for pleasant dreams. Locomotion, the aeroplane, and the Zepps devoted to peaceful uses, and putting the crawling train at sixty miles an hour to shame.

'Sir,' said Boswell, or one of the minor fry in the service of the Oracle of Fleet Street - I forget which'they are now busy with a scheme of rapid transit by means of postchaises.' And the rate of the acceleration of velocity?' queried the other. (I quote entirely from memory.) "They talk, sir, of twelve miles an hour.' 'Sir,' exclaimed the sage, it would be impossible; we could not breathe.' "There,' comments the biographer, 'that is just the man he was: he could always lay his finger on the weak point. They had never thought of that.'

When Smollett determined to exchange Edinburgh for London, on slender means, he took the wagon that trudged the whole way at a walking pace and pulled up at the inns for drinks and more passengers. It was good enough for all concerned. They played cards, quarreled, or chummed at their pleasure, and slept on the straw of the wagon on which they had trampled all day. There were ructions, of course, when the newcomers hustled in to find a berth for themselves, but nothing came of them; and the malcontents soon joined the majority to the cry of 'Full up.' One and all had anticipated our Victorians in the delusion that their Here and Now was the Age of Gold at last. What refinements on the poor old past! The sanitation (of the cesspool, though they never gave that a thought) in its stage of finality, and the Black Death of the pestilence that nearly made a desert of Europe never to return again. This note persisted throughout. We know

what we think now of Old Newgate as a prison system; but are we quite sure that it would not triumphantly bear comparison in the essentials of huggermugger happiness with the Holloway, the Wormwood Scrubs, or even the Parkhurst of to-day? There is really something to say for the paradox that the distribution of 'good time' has been fairly equalized among all the generations of man. If it did not come in one way, it came in another. The net ration of bliss was probably about the same. “The old Newgate,' you cry; 'how truly dreadful the scores of wretches, most of them on their way to the gallows, herded in the filth of one huge common room; gambling, cursing, fighting, drinking, as long as they had a penny to buy their tipple from the warders at a profit of a hundred per cent.' None but the devil to pay in rowdy enjoyment of a kind. It was 'company,' whatever else it was not, and for the lads of mettle of Swift's dreadful lines, the prospect of the ovation of the ride to Tyburn Tree!

As clever Tom Clinch, while the rabble was bawling,

Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling,

The maids and the wives to the balconies

I quote from memory again.

Compare this with the modern jail, and nothing better than your own thoughts for company or only the best of books for your reading, and that but a constant reproach to your way of life in this world, a constant threat of your fate in the next, and withal the chaplain to drive it home. Silence and isolation in the cell, and even in the workshops and the exercise yard. Mark the difference on the occasion referred to in the lines. Mr. Clinch and his spiritual adviser were

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both too busy, for edification, in their enjoyment of the scene; and the coffin with the hangman in the background of the vehicle were no spoil-sports. When the latter, in accordance with custom, 'fell down on one knee' for pardon and largesse before adjusting the noose, Tom, in the very plenitude of high spirits, 'gave him a kick for his fee. The very cleanliness and order of the modern prison are a weariness of the soul, with the utter impossibility of shaking a loose leg in any part of the premises.

Then why do anything at all, you may say? One state of life seems just as good as another when you are used to it. Prison reform is at best but a change of conditions without a change of happiness. A page of Smollett read now sickens the mind, and other parts of the system, at the thought of the brutalities they took as matters of course in his day. Even Nietzsche's nostrum of lethal-chambering at birth of nine tenths of the population, in order to clear the scene for the development of the nobility and gentry of nature, is but a quack medicine well advertised. Is this rule of thumb, step for step, to go on forever? No. The coarser worries will drop out of the reckoning, the finer, both of good and bad, will take their place. The eternal need of novelty and freshness of sensation will see to that.

It is a sort of Grimm's law of its subject. The repetition will become a torture of satiety, and to get rid of it will compel a change, in the hope of better luck in the next shuffle of the cards of fate. So one may safely prophesy the imperative change. A time comes when the sensitory organs of all mankind become so fine that a lapse in magnanimity, sweet reasonableness, or fine manners wounds like a blow. All our perhaps excessive culture seems making for that. It will be

a gain of a kind, for it will give us a lift from the plains to the heights, where we may hope to see more of the sunlight. The common clay will be at least finer clay, and that will make all the difference between eating from porcelain and eating from ruder ware.

It will not affect the balance; I adhere to that. We shall weary of the porcelain in due course, and goodness knows how we shall get our dinners at all, but that consideration belongs to the future, and it will take care of itself. As it is, the more delicate pleasures and pains of our present social system make those able to command them at will the envy of all for whom they are out of reach. It is the subtle difference between good wine or liqueurs served in their appropriate glasses or served out of a 'moog'-- to say nothing of the apartment in which the whole meal is dished. The boors of Teniers drank and fed in a cellar; their superiors had the better of it by a move upstairs, with all that the change imported in the beauty of the associations. But, with all that, the Golden Age of the Absolute of happiness is as far beyond reach as ever. Q.E.D.

The Manchester Guardian

THE SCIENTIFIC GHOST

BY L. COPE CORNFORD

WHERE are the ghosts of yesteryear? Where are the happy parties gathering about the blazing logs in the twilight of Christmas Eve, hearkening bright-eyed to the story teller? Without, the snow glimmers in the dusk, its frozen leagues enclosing the little casket of warmth and good cheer, wherein the firelight flickers rosily upon the paneled wall, and glistens here and there upon the wreathed holly. Put on another log. Draw closer. Now begin. Presently the children are

afraid to look up at the round mirror above the clock, so cloudily glistening, lest they see in it reflected something which, when they glance over their shoulders, is not there. And no one will go up to bed at the proper time. Where, I say, is that delightful gathering? You must ask Madam Science, that austere and spectacled maiden aunt, with her pocket microscope and a new set of keys jingling at her steelbuckled girdle.

Dame Science is now the story teller. No twilight for her, but a glare of electricity, and her audience, notebook in hand, sitting up straight on hard chairs, while their respected aunt reads a paper about telasthesia and the metethereal environment.

The ghost of Mr. Marley, Mr. Scrooge's deceased partner, is, of course, an hallucination on the part of Mr. Scrooge. Mr. Scrooge. As for the ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Present, they are the fantasies of an outworn sentiment. The White Lady who wrings her hands and weeps in dark corridors has vanished. The deathpale face which peers in at the window is a piece of telepathy. The mischievous sprite who smashes all the kitchen crockery at midnight - please produce your written evidence of eye witnesses. You cannot? Very well, then.

But Madam Science has read ninetyseven books about ghosts, and all that, and she coldly affirms that some of the books are true. Not, you understand, true in the sense in which simple people some years ago carelessly believed these stories, or at any rate told them to one another, with the most reckless disregard of the scientific method. Not that at all, but in the sense of natural phenomena, if you please, which have since been classified, labeled, and defined. And if, says Madam Science, frigidly, idle curiosity