initiation to the whole of our English-speaking population. And in
addition to reading and writing the vernacular, there is also almost
universally in schools instruction in counting, and wherever there is a
coinage, in the values and simpler computation of coins.

In addition to the vernacular teaching, one finds in the schools--at
any rate the schools for males--over a large part of the world, a
second element, which is always the language of what either is or has
been a higher and usually a dominant civilization. Typically, there is
a low or imitative vernacular literature or no literature at all, and
this second language is the key to all that literature involves--
general views, general ideas, science, poetic suggestion and
association. Through this language the vernacular citizen escapes from
his parochial and national limitations to a wide commonweal of thought.
Such was Greek at one time to the Roman, such was Latin to the
Bohemian, the German, the Englishman or the Spaniard of the middle
ages, and such it is to-day to the Roman Catholic priest; such is
Arabic to the Malay, written Chinese to the Cantonese or the Corean,
and English to the Zulu or the Hindoo. In Germany and France, to a
lesser degree in Great Britain, and to a still lesser degree in the
United States, we find, however, an anomalous condition of things. In
each of these countries civilization has long since passed into an
unprecedented phase, and each of these countries has long since
developed a great living mass of literature in which its new problems
are, at any rate, approached. There is scarcely a work left in Latin or
Greek that has not been translated into and assimilated and more or
less completely superseded by English, French, and German works; but
the schoolmaster, heedless of these things, still arrests the pupil at
the old portal, fumbles with the keys, and partially opens the door
into a ransacked treasure-chamber. The language of literature and of