There is, however, a thing that was once done in schools as a convenient accomplishment, and which has--with that increase in communication which is the salient material fact of the nineteenth century--developed in Western Europe to the dimensions of a political necessity, and that is the teaching of one or more modern foreign languages. The language-teaching of all previous periods has been done with a view to culture, artistic, as in the case of Elizabethan Italian, or intellectual as with English Latin. But the language-teaching of to-day is deliberately, almost conscientiously, not for culture. It would, I am sure, be a very painful and shocking thought indeed to an English parent to think that French was taught in school with a view to reading French books. It is taught as a vulgar necessity for purposes of vulgar communication. The stirring together of the populations that is going on, the fashion and facilities for travel, the production of the radii from the trading foci, are rapidly making a commonplace knowledge of French, German, and Italian a necessity to the merchant and tradesman, and the ever more extensive travelling class. So that so far as Europe goes, one may very well regard this modern modern-language teaching as--with the modern mathematics--an extension of the _trivium_, of the apparatus, that is, of thought and expression. [Footnote: In the United States there is less sense of urgency about modern languages, but sooner or later the American may wake up to the need of Spanish in his educational schemes.] It is an extension and a very doubtful improvement. It is a modern necessity, a rather irksome necessity, of little or no essential educational value, an unavoidable duty the school will have to perform. [Footnote: In one way the foreign language may be made educationally very useful, and that is as an exercise in writing translations into good English.]