The proper purpose then of the study of history in the college course is general preparation--preparation for life in general rather than for some special line of later study which builds upon it. To accomplish this purpose, and indeed every other, a certain amount of drill in names and dates is indispensable. Without it every result is insecure and all the instructor’s lessons hang in the air with no foundation to rest upon. But the teacher who makes drill in the facts his main object overlooks the almost universal experience that no matter how well a body of details may once have been learned they inevitably fade out of mind in later years unless the necessities of one’s daily occupation keep them fresh. What remains a constant possession is the general effect, the general impression once made by means of the details. The teacher who makes the general his main object, drawn from and enforced by a knowledge of the special which is for the moment clear and sound, deals with the most abiding of educational results. The effectiveness of history as a means of mental discipline is so great that the teacher is constantly tempted to make this his main object. With one who does I have no great quarrel. I have only to say that at best it is the choice of an inferior good and that it is devoting oneself to what is already abundantly provided for in the curriculum of studies. There is so much in any college course with which discipline of the mental faculties is necessarily connected, mathematics, elementary language studies, many of the sciences, that it seems a flagrant waste of opportunities to use history for the same purpose. Of the maxim, “history is philosophy teaching by example,” two different things are to be said. For the scholar and investigator it is a maxim full of danger, adding gratuitous perils to those which must beset his way, and it should be summarily discarded. For the teacher of history the danger is not so great, but he would be a very unusual man who could interpret the facts of history into political lessons for others without a very decided personal bias, or even succeed in disguising the influence of his private convictions upon his doctrines. It is doubtless more effective in most cases to let the facts speak for themselves, after a presentation of them which honestly endeavors to make them clear and to state them exactly as they are.