Whatever may be the aim of the serious student, the elective system is similarly fatal to it. I must be content with a single instance more. The signal merit of the old-fashioned curriculum was that its insistence on the classics and mathematics insured a mental culture and discipline of a very high order, and of a kind that is impossible where the student elects only purely scientific courses, or courses in which he happens to be especially interested. Let us suppose that the serious student wishes to elect his courses so as to receive this discipline. His plight is indicated in "Some Old-fashioned Doubts about New-fashioned Education" which have lately been divulged[5] by the Dean of Harvard College, Professor Le B. R. Briggs. The undergraduate "may choose the old studies but not the old instruction. Instruction under an elective system is aimed at the specialist. In elective mathematics, for example, the non-mathematical student who takes the study for self-discipline finds the instruction too high for him; indeed, he finds no encouragement for electing mathematics at all." The same is true of the classics. One kind of student, to be quite candid, profits vastly by the elective system, namely, the student whose artistic instinct makes him ambitious of gaining the maximum effect, an A.B., with the minimum expenditure of means. History D is a good course: the lectures do not come until eleven o'clock, and no thought of them blunts the edge of the evening before. Semitic C is another good course--only two lectures a week, and you can pass it with a few evenings of cramming. If such a man is fortunate enough to have learned foreign languages in the nursery or in traveling abroad, he elects all the general courses in French and German. This sort of man is regarded by Dean Briggs with unwonted impatience; but he has one great claim to our admiration. Of all possible kinds of students, he alone has found the pea. For him the elective system is elective. The men who developed the elective system, it is quite unnecessary to say, had no sinister intention. They were pioneers of educational progress who revolted against the narrowness of the old curriculum. The nearest means of reform was suggested to them by the German plan, and they sought to naturalize this _in toto_ without regard to native needs and conditions. But the pioneer work of the elective system has been done, and the men who now uphold it in its entirety are clogging the wheels of progress no less than those who fought it at the outset. The logic of circumstances early forced them to the theory that all knowledge is of equal importance, provided only that it is scientifically pursued, and this position in effect they still maintain. You may elect to study Shakespeare and end by studying American finance legislation; but so long as you are compelled to study scientifically, bless you, you are free.