Actions may at the moment speak louder than words, but methods of expression have as tell-tale a tongue for bygone times as ways of doing things.
If it should ever fall to my lot to have to settle that exceedingly vexed Eastern question,--not the emancipation of ancient Greece from the bondage of the modern Turk, but the emancipation of the modern college student from the bond of ancient Greek,--I should propose, as a solution of the dilemma, the addition of a course in Japanese to the college list of required studies.

It might look, I admit, like begging the question for the sake of giving its answer, but the answer, I think, would justify itself.
It is from no desire to parade a fresh hobby-horse upon the university curriculum that I offer the suggestion, but because I believe that a study of the Japanese language would prove the most valuable of ponies in the academic pursuit of philology.

In the matter of literature, indeed, we should not be adding very much to our existing store, but we should gain an insight into the genesis of speech that would put us at least one step nearer to being present at the beginnings of human conversation.

As it is now, our linguistic learning is with most of us limited to a knowledge of Aryan tongues, and in consequence we not only fall into the mistake of thinking our way the only way, which is bad enough, but, what is far worse, by not perceiving the other possible paths we quite fail to appreciate the advantages or disadvantages of following our own.

We are the blind votaries of a species of ancestral language-worship, which, with all its erudition, tends to narrow our linguistic scope.