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.”

I warn you that I am going to make a plea for something quite old fashioned, the tradition of humane letters. We have lost sight of it so completely that we almost never use the phrase any more and it seems to survive only in the title of an honorary degree which we sometimes bestow upon elderly dodos when we call them doctors of litterae humaniores, doctors of more humane letters. I believe we should be rendering a considerable service to higher education if we could turn out annually in regular course at least a handful of bachelors of humane letters. I say this because today even when the undergraduate throws himself upon our mercy and majors in English, or French, or Spanish, or German, or in American civilization, we turn him out not as a bachelor of humane letters (to say nothing of more humane letters) but usually as a bachelor of nationalistic history.