There was also a physical aspect. Proper exercise of the organs of speech is regarded by medical opinion as comparable to walking and swimming. In modern times we lay stress on the exercise of all parts of the body, but tend to neglect the proper cultivation of elocution. If we developed it more we might hear less of such prevalent things as ‘minister’s’ and ‘schoolmaster’s’ sore throat. Medical evidence goes to show that better exercise of the vocal organs is far more effective than surgical remedies. More important was the aesthetic side. We to-day have largely lost the sense of beauty in speech. Language has become to us for the most part a matter of the written word. We have ceased to feel as vividly as Isocrates did in his letter to Philip[1371] the need of the living voice to express the soul of which the letters are the body. The artistic joy which is found in the form and arrangement of words, in the sound given to them by a dramatic speaker, in the gestures of an accomplished orator—this joy has largely disappeared. Yet we feel that it was there in the Latin panegyrists. We may say that theirs is ‘a tale of little meaning’, but we must admit that ‘the words are strong’—strong and beautiful. To read their productions is like looking on a piece of mediaeval art, a stained-glass window, where the figures are grotesque and the fable futile, but the richly blended colours bind us by their beauty. They knew and lived for the inner loveliness of words. And perhaps they would say to us: ‘You who read so widely and know so much, you think you understand. But in order really to understand you must hear the word pronounced so that its sound as well as its form calls up a picture to the mind. It is only when you conceive of the study of a language as artistic both in sound and in form that it becomes the key to poetry. Do you not sometimes neglect the sound in your studies?’ They might also have said that there was an inarticulateness in modern times which led to misunderstanding: that if men had been taught to express their thoughts better there would be less strife and less dumb agony. And to a certain extent they would have been right. But against them we can urge serious charges. The simplest and most fundamental objection to the rhetorical system is that it neglected the search for truth. It thought too much of means and too little of ends. Lessing stated in his _Laocoon_ the eternal aim of science. ‘The ultimate object of the sciences is truth. Truth is necessary to the soul, and in the satisfaction of this essential need it is tyranny to employ even the slightest check.’[1372] The words apply to the education of our period. For the teachers of that time did not make truth their chief end, and how much tyranny there resulted for the soul of man we have had some opportunity of seeing.