deal of improvement. As Professor
Grandgent has trenchantly said "I do not believe there is or ever was
a language more difficult to acquire than French; most of us can name
worthy persons who have been assiduously struggling with it from
childhood to mature age, and who do not know it now: yet it is treated
as something any one can pick up offhand.... French staggers under the
fearful burden of apparent easiness." I do not think these words
overstate the case. All the more reason, then, to bear in mind that
the burden of this accomplishment should not fall on the college
course alone, or, I should even say, on the college course at all. For
the fact is that a thorough knowledge of the Romance tongues cannot be
acquired in any college course, and to attack the problem from that
angle alone is to attempt the impossible. It is on the school, and not
on the college, that the obligation of the practical language problem
rests. If our students are to become proficient in French--in the
sense that they can not only read it but write and speak it with
passable success--the language must be begun early, in the grade
school (when memory and apperception are still fresh), and then
carried forward systematically over a period of from six to seven
years. But this will require on the part of our schools: (1) a longer
time allotment to the subject than it now generally has, (2) a closer
articulation between the grade-school, high-school, and college
courses, and (3) the appointment of better and higher-paid teachers of
the subject. An encouraging move is being made in many parts of the
country to carry out this plan, though of course we are still a long
way from its realization; and when it is realized we shall not yet
have reached the millennium. But at least we shall have given the
practical teaching of the subject a chance, comparable to the
opportunity it has in Europe; and the complaint against the French and
Spanish teacher--if there still be a chronic complaint--will have
other grounds than the one we so commonly hear at present.

=Limitations of elementary and intermediate courses as college courses=

In the meantime, let us remember that the college has other, and more
pressing, things to do than to attempt to supply the shortcomings of
the school. It is certainly essential that the college should continue
and develop the practical work of the school in various ways, such as
advanced exercises and lectures in the foreign i