In looking back, it is of course very easy to underrate the real influence of one’s teachers. In the past couple of days I have happened to note both Gibbon’s characterization of his Oxford days as the most unprofitable of his whole career, and Henry Adams’s of his four years at Harvard as wasted. I have often, however, tried to estimate just what my education did for my own incomparably less powerful mind. I must have had in all, I think, about twelve or thirteen years, and as I look back on them I am impressed with the appalling waste of time and effort. I was naturally a bookish and studious boy. I began collecting my library when I could not have been more than ten or twelve, and was an eager student, yet I was taught Latin, German, and French, with the result that I never could read either of the first two without a dictionary. In conversation I never could speak[Pg 148] more than a sentence of any of the three, and I have never known an American student who could—that is, merely as a result of his studying a language in school and college. Yet, at thirty-five, I taught myself in a few months more Persian than I had ever learned of Latin in several years’ drudgery in boyhood. I remember, during the war, meeting on the street in Paris a young French lad of about twelve, of the better class, who stopped me and asked where he could get for his collection one of the insignia which I was wearing as an American officer. He spoke English fluently and, on my asking where he had learned it, he replied, somewhat surprised, “Why, at school.” In America, with all the colossal expenditure on buildings, that is a feat which, so far as I know, no American school has ever accomplished for one of its pupils.