This moral authority is what the new education seeks. To a casual eye, the colleges of to-day seem to be growing disorganized; a closer view shows construction taking place, but taking place along the lines of the vital distinction just pointed out. Men are striving to bring about a germane and ethical authority in the room of the baser mechanical authorities of the past. In this distinction, then, a clue is to be found which, if followed up, will lead us away from impossible limitations of the elective system, and conduct us at length to the possible, nay, to the inevitable ones. As the elective principle is essentially ethical, its limitations, if helpfully congruous, must be ethical too. They must be simply the means of bringing home to the young chooser the sacred conditions of choice; which conditions, if I rightly understand them, may compactly be entitled those of intentionality, information, and persistence. To secure these conditions, limitations exist. In the very nature of choice such conditions are implied. Choice is sound as they prevail, whimsical as they diminish. An education which lays stress on the elective principle is bound to lay stress on these conditions also. It cannot slip over into lazy ways of letting its students drift, and still look for credit as an elective system. People will distrust it. That is why they distrust Harvard to-day. The objections brought against the elective system of Harvard are in reality not levelled against the elective system at all. They are directed against its bastard brother, _laissez-faire_. Objectors suspect that the conditions of choice which I have named are not fulfilled. They are not fulfilled, I confess, or rather I stoutly maintain. To come anywhere near fulfilling them requires long time and study, and action unimpeded by a misconceiving community. Both time and study Harvard has given, has given largely. The records of scholarship and deportment which I exhibited in my first paper show in how high a degree Harvard has already been able to remove from choice the capricious, ignorant, and unsteadfast characteristics which rightly bring it into disrepute. But much remains to do, and in that doing we are hampered by the fact that a portion of the public is still looking in wrong directions. It cannot get over its hankering after the delusive modes of limitation which I have discussed. It does not persistently see that at present the proper work of education is the study of means by which self-direction may be rendered safe. Leaders of education themselves see this but dimly, as the papers of my critics naïvely show. Until choice was frankly accepted as the fit basis for the direction of a person by a person, its fortifying limitations could not be studied. Now they must be studied, now that the old methods of autocratic control are breaking down. As a moral will comes to be recognized as the best sort of steam power, the