COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY C. ALPHONSO SMITH ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 323.1 The Athenæum Bress 11-13-19280 Transs to 18 43 PREFACE The purpose of this collection of essays is twofold: first, to widen the student's range of interests; and, second, to furnish him with up-to-date material for talking and writing. College graduates are usually the first to admit in after years that during college days their interests were too contracted. The great frontier subjects, the subjects that lay outside of their chosen curriculum but that soon became. the tasks and problems of the new age, remained in many cases not only untouched but unglimpsed. However wide the student's reading or observation or experience may be in later years, he will still suffer from an early limitation of interest. We do not assimilate what we are not interested in; we do not advance unless guided by an advancing interest. To diversify the student's interests, therefore, to multiply his thought contacts, to increase the number of nuclei about which his reading and observation and experience may group themselves, becomes not only an essential of the education that calls itself liberal but equally an essential of the training that makes for intelligent and progressive citizenship. In using this material for discipline in speaking and writing, each teacher will pursue his own method. In a few essays there will of course be new words to be learned. In many more there will be familiar but hitherto unused words; now is a good time for the student to promote these words from his static to his dynamic vocabulary. There will also be not a few sentences whose build will help to break up the stereotyped and monotonous sentence structure that may have become habitual; a gain here is a gain along the whole line of effectiveness in writing and speaking. There will certainly be many paragraphs that will suggest to the student new and better ways of framing and furnishing his own paragraphs. But the central theme of each essay should take precedence of all minor subdivisions. Words, sentences, and paragraphs are helpful only as they render vivid and memorable the encompassing thought that each essay seeks to make clear. It will be best, I think, for the student to talk freely about each topic as a whole before he writes about it, and to write about it as a whole before proceeding to divisions or details. Above all, each topic should be so assimilated by the student as to leave ample residuum for the soil of a new and expanding interest. Each essay is presented unbroken. The original footnotes are also retained, only the few followed by "C. A. S." being the contribution of the editor. C. ALPHONSO SMITH |