The chief limitation, the one underlying all others, the one which no clever contrivance can ever supersede, is vitalized teaching. Suitable subjects, attractively taught, awake lethargic intention as nothing else can. An elective system, as even its enemies confess, enormously stimulates the zeal of teachers. It consequently brings to bear on unawakened boys influences of a strangely quickening character. When I hear a man trained under the old methods of prescription say, "At the time I was in college I could not have chosen studies for myself, and I do not believe my son can," I see, and am not surprised to see, that he does not understand what forces the elective system sets astir. So powerful an influence have these forces over both teachers and pupils, that questions of hard and easy studies do not, as outsiders are apt to suppose, seriously disturb the formation of sound intentions. The many leaders in education whose opinions on election I quoted in my previous paper agree that the new modes tend to sobriety and intentionality of aim. When Professor Ladd speaks of "the unexpected wisdom and manliness of the choices already made" in the first year of election at New Haven, he well expresses the gratified surprise which every one experiences on perceiving in the very constitution of the elective system a sort of limitation on wayward choice. This limitation seems to me, as Professor Ladd says he found it,[8] a tolerable preventive of choices directly aimed at ease. In a community devoted to athletics, baseball is not played because it is "soft," and football avoided on account of its difficulty. A similar state of things must be brought about in studies. In a certain low degree it has come about already. As election breeds new life in teaching, the old slovenly habit of liking best what costs least begins to disappear. Easy courses will exist and ought to exist. Prescribed colleges, it is often forgotten, have more of them than elective colleges. The important matter is, to see that they fall to the right persons. Where everything is prescribed, students who do not wish easy studies are still obliged to take them. Under election, soft courses may often be pursued with advantage. A student whose other courses largely depend for their profit on the amount of private reading or of laboratory practice accomplished in connection with them is wise in choosing one or more in which the bulk of the work is taken by the teacher. I do not say that soft courses are always selected with these wise aims in view. Many I know are not. We have our proper share of hardened loafers--"tares in our sustaining corn"--who have an unerring instinct as to where they can most safely settle. But large numbers of the men in soft courses are there to good purpose; and I maintain that the superficial study of a subject, acquainting one with broad outlines, is not necessarily a worthless study. At Harvard to-day I believe we have too few such superficial courses.