In many American colleges you will find a majority of the best students working at English literature. You will find a great many more good men working at European history and at the social sciences. This seems to be a logical way of trying to comprehend one's environment. At Oxford nearly all the best men are studying Greece and Rome instead of a modern civilization, and they are concentrating on Greek philosophy. Oxford looks hidebound. It is difficult to see how any one who emerges from a prolonged bout with Plato and Thucydides can be ready for "Sex" and "Labor."

At Oxford very few of the good men bother with a training in English literature or European history. They have already been pretty well saturated in these things at home, and the scholarship system encourages it in the school. The interest has been built up so well that it can be trusted to nourish itself. The English undergraduate is infinitely better prepared for labor problems by drinking in politics at every pore than is his American equivalent by a course in American National Problems. English families sometimes cat and sleep politics, American families tend to be bored by them. I do not mean to say that the English undergraduate is really well prepared for labor problems, I only say that he is better prepared than the American freshman. He has read much more about his won country's history, and in better books. It is hardly our place to sneer if the Englishman feels at eighteen that he will now learn more about his country by going a long distance away to look at it. He already knows it directly better than we know ours, and he can afford to try another angle. He goes to Greece and Rome.

Classics Read Carefully

First in Honor Mods a year and two thirds, or five terms, of epic, drama, and oratory. Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles Aoschylus, Homer, Lucretius, Demosthenes and Cicero. Remember that he is quite capable of getting through the thousand odd lines of the "Bacchae" in one long night when he first appears in Oxford. Then on this foundation Greats--two years and a third, or seven terms of history and philosophy. Thucydides, Herodotus, Livy, and Tacitus, and most of all Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics." This is supplemented by Bury and Meyer in Greek history and by Descartes, Hume, Kant and Croce.

Readers who are acquainted with the "Republic" will remember how it begins with an appeal to traditional wisdom and proceeds to discuss a minor Greek poet. Homer is cited again and again, Aeschyins appears here and there. The English student of Greek philosophy is able to begin the "Republic" with a background as much like that of Plato as any modern youth can attain. In Honor Mods and at school he has been saturated in the same poets. He can supply an apt quotation where Plato has not bothered to do so. He becomes intimately acquainted with Greek history and Greek institutions. He is able to deal with Plato as the quintessence of the Greek mind. After he has worked out Socrates' refutations of sophists who are as Greek as himself, the student passes on to criticisms of the Socratic position in the notes of Aristotle. He has thus explored a grand civilization in a number of its aspects.

Philosophy Merely a Background

When he uses a Greek idea as a clue to his own environment, his suggestions are not the abstractions of a doctrinaire philosophy out of touch with its fellow men. They represent in the students' own mind the reflections of philosophy genius on a society which was itself a work of genius, a society whose depths had been lit to their furthest reaches by fishes of poetic fire. All this background of the philosophy has been made accessible to the student.

For this the command of the language is an absolute sine qua non. Inexperto crede. I have attempted at various times to become familiar with Greek, but have not had much success because of my late start. The more I try to understand the major monuments of the Greek world, the more I am baffled by my inability to be sure exactly what significance is to be attached to the expressions on which arguments and descriptions turn. A smattering is better than nothing, and so is a dictionary, but there is no substitute for intimacy.

The student returns from his long tour with the scaffolding of a civilization laid bare, the structure and interconnection of its parts outlined in bold relief. He looks for such connections in his own environment with a boldness which often astonishes. He says, for instance, that experts ought to rule, that there is a connection between wisdom and good government.

Insistence on Method

This positive approach to modern problems is fostered at Oxford by dogged insistence on a method.

Thought requires the preliminary selection of an opinion which serves as an hypothesis for discussion pro and con. In the course of the student's work on a number of different fields within his chosen Honor School he considers several such hypotheses. But if the work is to be done with care the number of them must be small. And they must be related, so that the discussion of different suggestions begins to interact and provoke thought.

Greek philosophy offers very attractive hypotheses. This is not the same as saying that Plato is nice to read. Most of the dominant currents of western life were concentrated at Athens, and where-ever the same interests come together again the Greek way of finding a place for all of them is bound to exercise a powerful fascination. Moreover a method had been evolved by abstract philosophizing for dealing with these various interests. An intensity of social life had been achieved which fused them together in the common consciousness and demanded the highest type of poetic expression for the new unity. Plato formulates the conclusions of a very complete civilization, and only a very incomplete one could fail to find them worth discussing.

"The Greeks," says Nietzsche, "are simple. That is why they make the best teachers."

Long Vacations

The Oxford way of allowing long vacations establishes a very nice balance between the processes of saturation and gestation on one hand and of definition and formulation on the other. The work which is to be gone over in the eight weeks of the Oxford term has been assigned at the beginning of the previous vacation, which varies from six weeks (Christmas and Easter) to four months (summer). It is an unwritten law that you must not attempt to take as a basis for a formal essay anything which you are reading for the first time.

The success of these reading vacations depends first of all on the school which has built up a habit of independent work, and on the home which has also contributed to this, and provides peace and quiet, and an atmosphere in which serious reading is taken for granted. It is I think noteworthy that when the Oxonian goes home for his six weeks' Christmas vacation he attends five or six dances in the course of this period. Sometimes he goes abroad, or to some part of England other than his home, with a group of kindred spirits. The possibility of making steady progress without help from his usual instructor naturally grows with his experience of university life. And the concentration of his program makes much of his vacation reading repetition--a new attack on an old favorite, with many suggestions and problems of formal study to mull over and clarify in a fresh stream of impressions. The principal works are usually begun in the vac, then given considerable attention in a series of essays, then browsed over at odd times. Some months later they will again form the staple of vacation review preliminary to the final grind