[24 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
tion to dispense with that particular article which deals with the question 
of the rights of property. The degree of Bachelor of Arts has for cer- 
tainly four centuries carried with it certain associations. It has meant an 
aducation essentially founded upon the conception of humanistic culture 
—of a knowledge of the best that has been thought and said in the world 
upon the subject of the most interesting of the world’s products, man 
himself. If there are people like myself who, though not conscious of a 
conservative turn of mind, believe that this humanistic training—enriched, 
1s I have shown it to have been, by the addition of some training in 
natural science—is, for a good many persons, the best training, then, no 
matter how old-fashioned and simple-minded we may be, our degree, with 
the associations which centuries of our way of thinking have woven around 
it, should be left to us. If a foundation which omits that which is most 
characteristic of our degree, and replaces it by some of the new studies, is 
better than the foundation which we believe in, then its advocates should 
be proud that it should bear the name of these new studies. Not to do 
this—to demand the use of a degree because of its associations, when, in 
the very nature of things, the new course would inevitably create different 
associations—seems to me not merely a plain invasion of vested rights, but 
a palpable confusion of logic. If the case were reversed, if the dominant 
studies had for centuries been in natural science, with a corresponding 
degree of Bachelor of Science, I can hardly imagine that, upon the rise of 
a demand for a training with a foundation primarily humanistic, people 
of my way of thinking would insist that we be allowed to use the degree 
of Bachelor of Science, because of its centuries of associations of a differ- 
ent kind. And this I say, even though there would be some justification 
of such a demand in the fact that all work in language, so far as it falls 
within the domain of science, is carried on by scientific methods, and 
shat too large a proportion of us professors of languages are, in our own 
‘nvestigation and publication, men of science. and not men of the 
aumanistics. 
(2) The granting of the degree of Bachelor of Arts without Greek leads 
0 a very serious injury to many men. Harvard and Johns Hopkins, in 
giving up the requirement of Greek for that degree, did not intend that 
men should be forced not to take Greek, but only that men should not be 
corced to take it. Yet the inevitable, no matter how illogical, result of 
his action has been, for young men in countless high-schools in this 
country, precisely this, that, under the conditions of their life, they can- 
not get Greek at all. Greek has gone out of many schools on the ground 
that it was useless to continue to provide instruction in a subject which 
two great universities no longer regarded as necessary for the degree of 
Bachelor of Arts ; and it has also, for the same reason, stayed out of 
many schools into which it would otherwise in time have entered. Far 
better would it be, to mv mind, to run the risk that some men who might 
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