VALUE OF THE CLASSICS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3884, 21 August 1928, Page 15

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS.

WELLINGTON, August 14. i ‘ Professor R. S. Conw-ay senior professor of Latin at Manchester ■ University, arrived to-day by the Remuera, en route for Australia. He w'ill deliver public lectures at Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. As he is due to leave Web lington on August 24 for Sydney, it is doubtful whether he will be able to lecture at Auckland. He will deliver the Wilding lecture for 1928 at Canterbury College. In Australia Professoi Conw-ay will lecture in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide and Perth.

He attaches great importance to a study of the classics in modern education. The number of students of Latin had multiplied six times in England in the period from .1918 to • 1927, he said, and Greek students had doubled their numbers. Every kind of political training was 'to be got from a study of the clasf sics. The teachings of the histories of the Roman Empire and of ’ Greece- during the five centuries n.c. were absolutely unique, and by the application of those teachings the nations of to-day could govern themselves far better than they were doing. The wisdom v of the ancients was a powerful weapon 'with which to face, to-day’s problems. The older phases of civilisation could teacb us much of the history of freedom. In Australia lie hoped to show , how the line of cleavage iii the Great War w-as largely determined by the question ‘ whether or not the peoples had any share; in the civilisation descended froih classical-times. / Prussia 1 , a barbarous country^’whose people could not'evenwrite in' the year ' 1500, ‘had stood completely- outside that civilisation,.