HORRIBLE EFFECTS OF THE EXAMINATION SYSTEM.

IT costs a greater effort to concede even justice to our conquerors than to be magnanimous to our conquerors than to be magnanimous to our fallen foes. Xerxes would never hear any good of the Athenians; but the Black Prince waited upon King John at table. And I, if I had been victorious in my last encounter with my old enemies, might now play the Black Prince to the Examination System's King John. As it is - but who likes to sing of defeat?

Of the thirty thousand volumes that appear every year, the oddest and queerest is the Examination Book, - that book in which the student exhibits his little penny-whistle, and tries to persuade the instructor that it is a full brass band.

What a jumble of much fancy, more fiction, and little truth! What a parade of illogical thoughts! What a procession of ill-constructed sentences! And what shall one say of the system that produces such a result? what of the tree that bears such fruit? Does it not deserve to be cast down and thrown into the fire?

About the purposes of the Examination System, and about its success or failure in fulfilling these purposes, I have heard much argument; but concerning its effects upon instructors and students, I have heard little or nothing. Is it not at least an open question whether the good done the student's style by writing half a dozen themes and a few forensics is not more than out-weighed by the harm done in scribbling twenty blue books a year? For my part, I strongly suspect that to write the blue books of a college course would have ruined the style of Addison and made Dr. Johnson unreadable.

Concerning the effect of the system upon the instructor, there can be no question. Dr. A. Potter, in his able book on Reading, says: "It is nearly an axiom that people will not be better than the books they read." Not better than the books they read? Great Heavens! Do you not tremble for our instructors? Are they to descend at last to the level of the blue book? Are they to be no better than that "wretched heap and hotch-potch of words and ideas"? Alas! what a horrible destiny! But ought they not to be rescued? Ought not the system to be abolished, and our instructors saved? A few more years of this diet of so many husks and so few kernels, a few more years of exposure to this book of awful manner, matter, and style, and what will become of our professors?

X. X.