Undernourishment in English

IT IS my hope, as instructor in Spanish and French, that students who wish to thrive in language shall first take Latin, along with, of course, the usual contemporaneous ground courses in English. Then I shall hope that they will be reasonably equipped to know and love good English. In such prepared soil the modern foreign languages, with the demands they have to make for success upon student industry, undreamed of by the average man, can be successfully planted, and in no other. I propose Latin, in short, for all who conceive the desire to know English. The struggle, for it is a struggle, for French and Spanish, etal., can come later, and will not then be foredoomed to disheartening failure. Great numbers of our students of the foreign languages have not won satisfactory returns, and unfortunately they are unconscious of the principal reason therefor; whereas, with mental alertness and enterprise conditioned and fortified by a fairly stocked vocabulary of things, states, and actions, they could have marched on to victory, with abundant laughs at the discouraging vaporizings of educational theorists. A pathetic aspect of the workings of undernourishment in language shows in the persons of some who go about excitedly at registration time signing up in modern poetry, modern novel, contemporary literature, Shakespeare, and so on, while shunning with all positiveness Latin, French, and their kindred. They have been in crowded classes in English composition, because a large part of our educational counsel thinks this is the be-all and the end-all for English fundamentals, and have emerged still most unsoundly prepared for the tasks before them. Such a course, though indeed fundamental, could do little immediately or ultimately for their word stock or their inner feeling for style and form, and their consequent incapacities now disqualify them for any proper assimilation of literature. But they are blissfully unaware of their predestination to defeat, while the devoted professors labor to bridge for them a gap which cannot be bridged. When I meet rare new students whose language impresses me as much above the average, I ask them if they think Latin has been the big influence on their English. Some quickly say yes, while others have no certainty as to the primary cause. Some are a little surprised, for they have not even noticed their superiority over their fellows until actual

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