We can be sadly confident that it will be some time before undergraduate courses in East European history and culture will everywhere acquire a proper direction and clear acceptance. But year by year, as these studies expand in the colleges, an increasing number of students are affected and Slavic studies are coming closer and closer to the academic level and seriousness of the older disciplines. This offers hope for the future and, while we cannot expect a Slavic department to become one of the numerically larger departments, it can rise to its opportunities and exercise its functions both in training specialists and in broadening the knowledge of a larger and larger number of students. The lag in Slavic studies is diminishing with each year and it will soon vanish entirely if developments of the present day are carefully regarded. _IV. Language Instruction_ The first task of a Slavic or East European language department is of course to teach the language. It should be taken for granted that any person who claims to be a specialist in the history and culture of any country should be able to read, write, speak and understand its language. The language courses in any department are intended to satisfy these requirements. This however is a goal and the merest contact with even good students will show how far it is from being fully realized. Yet it must be the goal even though we accept something far short of it as that which can be reasonably attained. There is no easy way to learn a foreign language and to maintain fluency in it. And fluency can be best secured by a constant use of the language, hardly possible in the United States despite the aspiration of the student. Somewhere, somehow there must be a compromise. There are, of course, scattered individuals like the late Professor John Dyneley Prince, who seemed to have a special gift for speaking foreign tongues. As a matter of fact, Prince built his entire scholarly and political career on this inborn gift. His knowledge of spoken tongues was fantastic, but it should be recognized that he maintained it only by a constant preoccupation with language. The time that others spent on bridge and other hobbies, he dedicated to reading dictionaries and annotating grammars. He continued, so long as his health allowed, the labor which made it possible for him to perform his almost incredible feats. Men like Prince are exceptional, but they emphasize the fact that there is no single road to success. Every individual learns languages in his own way and hence there can easily be a wide divergence of educational methods recommended.