Retrospect and Prospect

Extract

Like my predecessors on this annual occasion, I have had to make a choice between offering you a paper on a subject in my special field of study or discussing some of the general professional problems that concern us all. Other presidents have settled this question in different ways. In the somewhat similar period after the first World War, I remember, President Armstrong told us that our proper course as scholars was to cultiver nos jardins, and it might have been wisest for me this evening to have undertaken some intensive horticulture in the Celtic or mediaeval field. But I have myself been so pre-occupied with the present situation in humanistic education and research, the subject has been so constantly forced upon my attention in my reading and in my association with other scholars, that I have found it hard not to discuss the matter here. After all, the political and economic upheaval of the war has been accompanied by a disturbance hardly less profound in the republic of letters and learning. The time seems to call for a kind of speech from the throne. And though we have no throne or monarch—only a very transitory president—I am going to ask you to listen to a few considerations on the “state of the realm.”