lessons and reveal the world of the past, but a sane compromise has declared that these additional means should fulfill the role of accessories, not of principals.

BETWEEN COORDINATION AND SUBORDINATION OF STUDIES

As there must be a choice in the means, or a compromise, to keep to the term in the sense we have been using it, there must also be a compromise in the relative prominence of these means. Modern education has pretty well agreed upon the languages, mathematics, some special sciences and history as essential means of developing the faculties. Modern education does not always admit there should be subordination of those means. The tendency seems to be to put all these means on the same level, to coordinate them in the process of education. In some cases, for example, history is treated as practically the equivalent in educational force to the study of the classical languages, but in order to make it so, its professors have assembled around it various subsidiary helps from other studies. Composition and analysis and mapdrawing and debates and fiction and drama and art, in a word, every educational device has been centered upon history, which becomes in that case a principal study.

Some writers on eduation, like John Stuart Mill, would not seem to admit a large amount of disciplinary value in history. There are two things in history, his opinion seems to be, facts and the causal connection of facts. The facts he would have imparted to students who are not likely to have leisure in after life to gather them from private reading; the causal connection of facts, or the philosophy of history, belongs to the professional school. Recent years have witnessed an immense activity in historical lines, partly because the world is growing old and becoming reminiscent, partly because evolutionary theories have put people to

studying origins and growths. The schools were prompt to respond to the new stimulus, and history which was formerly content to be an accessory, now in many places has been raised to the dignity of a principal study. By the various devices already mentioned as well as by others the attempt is made to have the lessons of history educate in the process of committing them to memory. The attempt has, undoubtedly, met with its share of success, but even with the help of all the means borrowed from other subjects to which these means more properly belong, it is impossible to deny the truth that history for the lower schools is a question of committing facts to memory and so not suited to usurp the role of a principal study which should appeal to more than one of the mental faculties. The coordination of history as a principal subject seems to have worked harm in other ways, and recently Superintendent Maxwell of New York City has expressed regret that the teaching of Greek and Roman History should have been taken from the Latin and Greek teachers. Another instance of advanced views in education completing the orbit of experimentation and now returning to the original point of departure.

The evils of excessive coordination have never been put so strongly as they have been in his recently published annual report by President Pritchett, of the Carnegie Foundation. He quotes the views of twenty-one tutors who give their opinions on all the Rhodes scholars from America or on certain individuals. The reports offer rather gloomy reading. Sixteen of the criticisms fasten on lack of thoroughness, smattering and dilettanteism. The following serve as a specimen: "I think that their training in America has, in most cases, encouraged smattering in a large number of subjects. As a general rule, they know nothing well, but know something about a great many things-the kind of knowledge you might get from attending public lectures." President Pritchett,

commenting on these views, says among other things: "These shrewd criticisms show unmistakably that the average American who goes as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, even though he be a college graduate, finds the work to which he is there assigned fully worthy of his mettle; and they show also most clearly that in the majority of cases the student finds difficulty in doing his work, arising out of the superficiality and the diffuseness of his previous training in the American secondary school and in the American college, and the failure of this training to give him intellectual power."

Such criticism might have been confidently expected by anyone that has marked the evolution of our education for the past fifty years. Representative professors of America went to Germany for their education. On their return they imposed university methods on American colleges; and the colleges, in turn, on the high schools. Had they brought back the whole German system, education would not have suffered so much, although the substitution of a new system in place of American traditional systems would have caused some difficulty. Perhaps it is this university training in Germany of American professors that furnishes the sufficient explanation of the mushroom growth of electivism. At all events, the American college and high school of fifty or sixty years ago differed but little in its educational system from the corresponding Catholic college and high school. The classics were supreme in both and other subjects were kept as accessories only; in both there was concentration upon definite subjects directed to a definite aim. There was subordination and not coordination. A striking proof of this close unity and singleness of purpose in teaching may be found in such a book as Goodrich's British Eloquence, now out of print. The book is an eloquent testimony of the teaching at Yale in the middle of the nineteenth century. Chauncey Goodrich was

professor of rhetoric there for more than thirty years at the time of editing his book. What was the system followed? "He took," he says in his preface, "Demosthenes' Orations for the Crown as a text book, making it the basis of a course of informal lectures on the principles of oratory." To Demosthenes, as his notes show, he added Cicero, and to both the best orators in English. Here was a professor bringing the oratory of Greece, Rome, England and America to bear upon one subject, the art of public speaking. That concentration of three or more literatures upon the acquisition of one art is the practice in Catholic colleges and schools today. The university methods of coordinate and separate departments, each directed to the mastering of some science, not of an art, is the characteristic of most other schools and colleges in America today. Which system is more likely to effect that thoroughness which has been found lacking? FRANCIS P. DONNELLY, S. J.

St. Andrew's on the Hudson,

Poughkeepsie, N. Y.

BENEDICTINE EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES

From its rise in the sixth century up to our own days, the Order of St. Benedict has always been preeminently a civilizer of nations. St. Benedict himself began this work of civilization by destroying the last remnants of paganism on Monte Casino, and his sons have faithfully continued to spread the light of Christianity and civilization throughout Europe. In proof of the early missionary and civilizing activity of the Benedictine Order suffice it to mention St. Augustine, who, with about forty other Benedictines, was sent to England by Pope Gregory I, himself a Benedictine, to spread the light of the true Faith among the pagan Anglo-Saxons; St. Boniface, St. Willibrord, St. Suitbert, St. Pirmin, who preached the Gospel of Christ in various parts of Germany; St. Ansgar, who converted Scandinavia; and St. Adalbert, who evangelized Prussia, Bohemia and Hungary. Throughout the Middle Ages the Benedictine monasteries were so many lighthouses that flashed their lights of learning over the whole western world. In recompense for these great services to mankind, the false reformers of the sixteenth century destroyed countless monasteries on the European Continent and literally annihilated the Order in England. Scarcely had it recovered from these reverses when in the middle of the eighteenth century the forcible secularization of monasteries was inaugurated in Austria and spread over the whole of Europe, so that in the first half of the nineteenth century nearly all the Benedictine monasteries had been appropriated by the secular powers and the monks were driven penniless from their homes. But phenix-like the Order rose from its ruins and today bids fair to regain its pristine splendor. It was due to the