rn, and the classic is the immortal, the timeless
distillation of human experience.

But I wander from my thesis which is that the classics are needed as the
_fallow_ to give lasting and increasing fertility to the natural mind out
upon democracy's great levels, into which so much has been washed down and
laid down from the Olympic mountains and eternal hills of the classical
world.

In the war days we naturally ignored the _fallow_. We cultivated with
Hooverian haste. It was necessary to put our soil in peril of exhaustion
even as we put our men in peril of death. Forty million added acres were
commandeered, six billions of bushels of the leading cereals were added to
the annual product of earlier seasons. The land could be let to think only
of immediate defense. Crops only could be grown which would help promptly
to win the war. Vetch and clover and all else that permanently enriched
must be given up for war gardening or war farming. The motto was not
_Americanus sedendo vincit_ but _Americanus accelerando vincit_.

But on this day of my writing (the day of the signing of the peace) I am
thinking that in agriculture and in education as well, we must again turn
our thoughts to the virtues of thoroughness and patience--the virtues of
the fallow, that is, to ploughing and harrowing and tilling, _not_ for the
immediate crop, but for the enrichment of the soil and of the mind,
according as our thought is of agriculture or education.

Cato, when asked what the first principle of good agriculture was, answered
"To plough well." When asked what the second was, replied "To plough
again." And when asked what the third was, said "To apply fertilizer." And
a later Latin writer speaks of the farmer who does not plough thoroughly as
one who becomes a mere "clodhopper." You will notice that it is not sowing,
nor hoeing after the sowing, but ploughing that is the basic operation.

It is the sowing, however, that is popularly put first in our agricultural
and educational theory. "A sower went forth to sow." A teacher went forth
to teach, that is, to scatter information, facts:--arithmetical,
historical, geographical, linguistic facts. But the emphasis of the
greatest agricultural parable in our literature was after all not on the
sowing but on the soil, on that upon which or into which the seed fell,--or
as it might be better expressed, upon the _fallow_. It was only the fallow
ground, the ground that had been properly cleared of s