The most unfortuate limitation at present, it must be frankly said, is the absence of teachers. It may with some justice be asked why the teachers of Greek at present have not made their profession more attractive, seeing that they have had an environment so spiritually stimulating. But it must be understood that these teachers have been trained generally to regard Greek material with a narrowly scientific bias. German higher criticism has done its best to bleed them white. Similarly, we may remember, people have read the words of Jesus and have developed from them a cult of monasticism which has regulated the religious emphasis of centuries with its dogma. In both cases we have a right to insist upon a revival of the original.

We need to-day, for this new presentation of Greek, men trained not so much in the niceties of grammar and scientific description of artistic data as in a humanistic and liberal approach to Greek material. And I venture to say it is not professional teachers we chiefly need. Men radiantly in love with the spirit of Greece, themselves intellectually alive, æsthetically eager, practically vigorous and balanced, will be needed to build that new society educated to completeness of life, to which we shall love to pay allegiance in more intelligent patriotism than we have yet known. No, we shall not fear for professional teachers, provided we have plenty of amateurs. As such we may well enlist ourselves together as a united army to wage this bright and valiant battle for the cause of Hellenism.

Camp Devens, Mass.

WALTER R. AGARD.

HUN AND HUMANIST

The political alliance of America with England and France, which has revealed the essential identity of American national ideals with those of the allies, stands out in somewhat startling contrast to the academic relations that Americans within the past few decades have established with European countries. When, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the settlement of the United States had been practically completed, industrial and commercial development had made great advance, and the increasing pressure of a population augmented by vast numbers of immigrants began to bring out social inequalities and industrial unrest, so that there came about a modification of conditions under which a purely individualistic nation like America could flourish, Americans began to turn to the more complex and elaborate civilization of Europe for light on the problems that were becoming common to both Europe and America. Coincident with this, and a part of the same movement, was the awakening of an interest in higher education in America, which resulted in the remarkable development of educational machinery, exemplified particularly in the rise of the American state university. The feeling of a need for a more perfect social organization and for the scientific knowledge requisite for a more complex industrial system, and expanding opportunities in the academic field, drove American students in increasing numbers to the universities of Europe. For a number of reasons the great majority of these went to Germany; so that the latter decades of the nineteenth century as well as the first decade of the twentieth might be called the era of predominant German influence upon American thought. To set forth some reasons why our students went to Germany instead of to England or France, and to determine the nature of the German influence upon America, is the purpose of this article.

In their search for enlightenment American students as a class avoided England probably because of the feeling that England had little to offer America. What was good in the English ideal, self-reliance and reverence for the individual, the early colonists

had brought over; and what was bad, the tyranny and inequality of English society, they had largely avoided. Besides, there still existed a strong anti-British prejudice, the legacy of the Revolution. The choice of the mentor of American enlightenment, then, lay between Germany and France.

The notion one forms of the French character from books is of a people with strong social instincts and great powers of social cohesion, in whom rationality predominates over sentiment, who clarify tradition and convention with reason, who subordinate the individual to the group or institution, and who have achieved a wide diffusion of intelligence in its general and humane aspects. Of the Germans one is apt to think of energy, of enthusiasm approximating violence, of sentiment, and yet of patience and meticulous industry in application to facts and details. But it is questionable whether the character of peoples is determined by inherent national traits. Are they not more probably the product of their time and of geographical and historical circumstance? Pursuing this speculation, we may conceive the barbarian as a man of robust health, of abounding energy, of strong emotions, and of capability for intense enthusiasms, but given to sentimentality, moodiness, and egotism, and susceptible to superstition and illusion. The more civilized man is of calmer and more equable temper, urbane, civil, reasonable, just, self-controlled, and resigned. He is more impersonal and objective in his attitude, is devoted to general principles and ideas, and possesses mature powers of judgment. In line with this it would appear that the qualities of the French are those of a mature and advanced civilization; of the Germans, those that result from grafting some of the virtues of a mature civilization upon a stock the qualities of which are still to a great extent those of the barbarian; and of the English, at least of the nineteenthcentury English, those of a civilization somewhere in its development between that of the German and the French.

The qualities of the French, if we may dismiss inherent racial attributes as subordinate, may be accounted for by the historical and geographical position of France. Situated next to Italy and bordering both on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, she became the medium through which the Græco-Roman civilization

was passed on to modern Europe and America. Being conquered by the Romans and adopting a form of the Latin language, she was occupied in assimilating the older civilization through several centuries in which the peoples of Britain and Germany were hardly touched by its influence. If the four conditions of a mature civilization may be enumerated as institutions and traditions, a national spirit due to the achievement of political unity, a considerable time in which the beneficent effect of institutions and traditions may permeate society, and finally liberty, democracy is some form, it is clear that France has possessed all of these conditions. To these may be added her failure as a colonizer in competition with Great Britain; for emigration, while preserving individualism, did away, as in England, with the necessity of the more equable social organization which was imperative in countries where, as in the case of France, an increasing population had to be accommodated to static natural

resources.

In contrast to France, Germany, at least in the somewhat arbitrary perspective of the present, seems the victim of a series of historical misfortunes. Her later contact with civilization and the foreshortened period within which her institutions and traditions could affect her people, the fact that for years she suffered the blight of being the battle-ground of the contending rulers and nationalities of Europe, the late date-1870-in which she finally attained nationality and political unity, leaving but a scant space of a few years for her to assimilate civilization before taking her place as one of the major powers, all this tended to render her an immature leader in world affairs. Besides, liberty of thought, democracy in the sense that is familiar to the French, English, and Americans, Germany has not even yet attained. In the field of emigration and colonization Germany was also too late. Both before and after the realization of her national unity she had a large surplus of population to send abroad, but there were practically no opportunities for colonization; England and Spain had already appropriated most of the desirable lands. The effects upon England and France-the development of Anglo-Saxon individualism through emigration and the French achievement of a rational and a democratic social organi

zation through the necessity of accomodating their own surplus population-were both largely lost to Germany through her period of heavy emigration.

The fact, however, that concurrently with the achievement of nationality Germany was victorious in two foreign wars served as a powerful stimulus to the progress of German civilization. The nation awoke to self-consciousness and a sense of power, so that there ensued a period of rapid progress comparable almost to the age of Pericles and the subsequent years in Athens and the age of Elizabeth in England.

In these periods of stimulation of national life nations devote their exuberant energies to achievement in those lines of effort that are especially characterestic of the civilization of their time. In Athens the quickened mental life was expressed in literature, art, and philosophy; in the England of Elizabeth the exuberance of the people found an outlet in literature, the lyric and the drama. The period of German awakening was synchronous with the dominance of science in the thought of the world; and possibly in consequence of this, the achievement of the Germans was characteristically in the field of science. This was not without its dangers both to the symmetry of German civilization and the peace of the world; for the scientific movement in its beginning was frankly agnostic and naturalistic; and in its development it has worked rather consistently for success in the sphere of the practical, the economic, and the materialistic.

Somewhere within this period of German leadership, the science and learning of Germany, under the domination of an autocratic and aristocratic form of government, was gradually made an instrument for promoting the imperialistic designs of the rulers, with the political consequences of which the world is tragically familiar. But the influenee of German scholarship upon America has been that of science without imperialism.

In view of the foregoing, it may be more obvious why the American student of the latter decades of the nineteenth century gravitated to Germany instead of to England or France. The quest of that which should offset the one-sidedness of AngloSaxon individualism, an anti-British prejudice in many cases, an academic preparation inadequate for graduate study at Oxford or Cambridge but sufficient for candidacy for the German Ph.D. degree, a desire to study under many of the acknowledged