The May Easy Chair published an essay by Mr. George William Curtis which defends the late movement to "widen the colleges." He takes the ground that Greek and Latin should be elective as in Harvard. He declares that no one should be completed to "waste his time" in studying those studies for which he has a positive distaste. He claims that the training derived from such studies would be barren in its results. He claims that "a general degree should attest equality of devotion and accomplishment in a curriculum of studies, adjusted with due reference to difficulty and labor." He goes further with regard to the classics in claiming that "classical proficiency may be distinguished in a degree, as excellence in science, in medicine, in divinity, in philosophy, or in any other particular branch, is now distinguished." This is comparatively a new view of the classical dispute. Aside from the much contested point as to the value of the peculiar character of the intellectual training to be derived from classical study, it is a very sensible view. Mr. Curtis claims that classical training in our day has reached an abnormal growth. The demands for admission to our colleges cover in regard to classical requirements as much, possibly, as our fathers had, and more than our grandfathers had, when they graduated from college. The writer cites the great growth of Harvard since the adoption of the elective system as an argument in favor of its general adoption among the other leading colleges of the country. Mr. Curtis then unfolds a plan by which the highest aims in education can be attained. He says that the high schools should now be made to serve the purpose of the colleges of two generations ago while the scope of the universities should be so enlarged that they can serve as a field for the individual expansion of the students. With regard to the colleges which still retain the ancient rigid requirements of classics, Mr. Curtis says "no college can justly plume itself upon superior fidelity to the classics because it insists that they shall be a bed of Procrustes upon which every student shall be equally stretched." And yet he does not see any very desolate outlook for the future of the classics. The classics will still be studied as long as there are students who have a fondness for such studies in languages "as come through a large familiarity with the ancient classics."