Every mode of training has its exclusions. I prefer the one which brings least profit to our dangerous classes,--the indolent rich. Leslie Stephen has said that the only argument rascals can understand is the hangman. The only inducement to study, for boys of loose early life, is compulsion. But for the plain democratic many, who have sound seed in themselves, who have known duty early, and who have found in worthy things their law and impulse, the elective system, even during the freshman year, gives an opportunity for moral and mental expansion such as no compulsory system can afford. * * * * * Perhaps in closing I ought to caution the reader that he has been listening to a description of tendencies merely, and not of completed attainment. In no college is the New Education fully embodied. It is an ideal, toward which all are moving, and a powerfully influential ideal. In explaining it, for the sake of simplicity I have confined myself to tracing the working of its central principle, and I have drawn my illustrations from that Harvard life with which I am most familiar. But simplicity distorts; the shadows disappear. I am afraid I may seem to have hinted that the Harvard training already comes pretty near perfection. It does not--let me say so distinctly. We have much to learn. Side by side with nobler tendencies to which I have directed attention, disheartening things appear. The examination paper still attacks learning on its intellectual side, the marking system on its moral. All I have sought to establish is this: there is a method which we and many other colleges in different degrees have adopted, which is demonstrably a sound method. Its soundness should by this time be generally acknowledged, and criticism should now turn to the important work of bettering its details of operation. May what I have written encourage such criticism and help to make it wise, penetrative, and friendly. FOOTNOTES: [4] But a great deal of the expense also. How much larger the staff of teachers must be where everything is taught to anybody than where a few subjects are offered to all, may be seen by comparing the number of teachers at Harvard--146, instructing 1586 men--with those of Glasgow University in 1878--42, instructing 2018 men. [5] Or sixteen per cent of his recitations. Readers may like to compare this result with the number of absences elsewhere. At a prominent New England college, one of the best of those which require attendance, a student is excused from ten per cent of his exercises. But this amount does not cover absences of necessity,--absences caused by sickness, by needs of family, and by the many other perfectly legitimate hindrances to attendance. The percentage given for the Harvard seniors includes all absences whatsoever. IX ERRONEOUS LIMITATIONS OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM