He began by saying that the _gymnasia_ (answering roughly to the Latin schools of England and the grammar-schools or academies of America) had in their time done good service, but no longer answered the requirements of the nation or the necessities of the time. They produced crammed minds, not virile men; wasting on musty Latin and general classical lore the time which should be devoted to inculcating a knowledge of German language and history--knowledge which was of infinitely more value to a German than all the chronicles of an alien antiquity combined. Had these schools done anything to combat the follies and chimeras of Social Democracy? Alas! the answer must be something worse than a negative--and tell not alone of an urgent duty left undone, but of evil wrought on the other side. He himself had sat on the various forms of a _gymnasium_ at Cassel--a very fair sample of that whole class of schools--and he therefore knew all about their ways and methods, and the sooner these were mended the better it would be for every one. It was undoubtedly true, William went on to admit, that in 1864, 1866, and 1870 the Prussian teachers’ work showed to advantage. They had in those past years done a good deal to inculcate, and thus help to fruition, the idea of national unity--and it was safe to say that during that period every one who completed his _gymnasium_ course went away after the final examination convinced that the German Empire should be reestablished, and crowned by the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine. But with 1871 this practical process of education came abruptly to an end, although as a matter of fact there was more than ever a need of teaching young Germans the importance of preserving their Empire and its political system intact. The consequence was that certain malignant forces had grown up and developed to a threatening degree, and for this the schools were clearly to blame. Since 1870, he proceeded, there had been in German education a veritable reign of the philologists. They had been sitting there enthroned in the _gymnasia_, devoting all their attention to stuffing their pupils’ skulls with mere book-learning, without even a thought of striving to form their characters aright, or training them for the real needs and trials of practical life. This evil had gone so far that it could go no farther. He knew that it was the custom to describe him as a fanatical foe to the _gymnasium_ system. This was not true; only he had an open eye for its defects as well as its merits--of which, unfortunately, there seemed a heavy preponderance of the former.