As to whether the sweeping away of the humaner classical letters in the interests of the applied sciences as a means of culture is a good thing or a bad there must be two opinions--but there is no doubt that by getting rid of Plutarch the change will extraordinarily influence humanity. Ethics, morality, rules of life must of necessity be profoundly modified and destandardized. For I suppose that no human being from the end of the Dark Ages to the beginning of the late War--no human being in the Western World who was fitting himself for a career as member of the ruling-classes--was not profoundly influenced by that earliest of all novelist-biographers. And, if you sweep away Marcus Aurelius as altruist-moralist, the Greek Anthology as a standard of poetry, Livy as novelist-historian, Cicero as rhetorician, and Pericles as heaven-born statesman, you will make a cleavage between the world cosmos of to-day and that of all preceding ages such as no modern inventions and researches of the material world have operated. For though swiftening of means of locomotion may have deprived humanity of knowledge of mankind, it did little to change the species of generalizations that mankind itself drew from its more meagre human instances. Till the abolition of classical culture in the Western World the ruling-classes went on measuring Gladstone or the late Theodore Roosevelt by Plutarchian standards--but neither post-1918 King George V nor any future President of the United States can hope to escape by that easy touchstone. From the beginnings of industrialism till 1918 we went on rolling round within the immense gyrations of buzzings, clicks, rattles, and bangs that is modern life under the auspices of the applied sciences; we went on contentedly spinning round like worms within madly whirling walnuts. But as a guide the great figure had gone. There is not only no such figure in the world as Washington, Nelson, or even Napoleon--but there is no chance that such a figure can ever arise again. Nay, even the legendary figures that remain have lost at least half of their appeal. A statue of Washington adorns the front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, but it is doubtful if one in a thousand of the passers-by have even heard of the axe and the cherry-tree, let alone knowing anything of his tenacity, single-mindedness, and moral courage. And who in the North American Republic has heard of Nelson and his signal? For the matter of that, as I have elsewhere related, a young lady science graduate of a very distinguished Eastern University was lately heard to ask when she caught sight of the dome of the Invalides: “Who _was_ this Napollyong they talk so much about here?” Of course pronunciation may have had something to do with that. But it was in 1923 that the question was asked, and since then a popularizing novel-biography of Napoleon has had an immense vogue in the United States.