Laudator Temporis Acti

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), "A New Menace to Education: The Growing Contempt for Culture and the Classics in American Universities," Meredith College, Quarterly Bulletin 1919-1920: Special Education Number, pp. 1-6 (at 1, footnote omitted):

Well, Yale has followed her sisters and dropped Latin from her entrance exams. You can get stamped as an educated Yale man without knowing bonus bona bonum.

And how much Latin did the American colleges ever teach? Any boy with good teaching could learn enough Latin in six months to get into an American college. And just this amount, this little smattering of Latin, is enough to make the whole difference in any man's outlook upon civilization. This bonus bona bonum makes French and Spanish and Italian easy to him. It puts him at home in half the words of the English language. It acclimates him in literature, in European travel, in South America. Almost everything an educated man has to do with is tinged with bonus bona bonum.

The tincture of Latinity which the Roman Empire left upon Europe is to modern cultivation what Christianity is to modern religion,—it pervades everything. These two elements—Latin and Christianity—taken together, make up the unity of the modern world. They form the common inheritance of modern Europe,—a sort of deep inter-racial bond, which, so far as human reason can see, is the most important thing in the life of the western world.

And now our Universities have decided that the Latin phrase-book is too hard for the American brain. It is difficult and unnecessary.

Id. (at 5-6):

There has never been a literature in the world which did not spring from the worship of old forms, and a digging into the roots of language. It is not merely because Latin is dropped that we must grieve, but because the dropping of Latin shows that our educators do not know what learning is. They do not understand the relation which exists between language and mind. They have inherited the fruits of a whole army of American saints who planted our colleges large and small,—religious pioneers, for the most part,—but all of them students, scholars and prophets of scholarship. It was these men who gave the light to democracy. It is they who made us. They are the pit out of which we are digged. It is they who have united us to Europe and made possible the future union of mankind. For it is by our literacy we stand.

And now the successors of these spiritual Fathers of America discard the rudiments of literacy. The next generation of American college presidents will not themselves have known bonus bona bonum. If you speak to them of Rome they will be dumb.

The essay was originally printed in Vanity Fair (June, 1919), but Vanity Fair's  owner Condé Nast now wants $8 in exchange for viewing the article. The entire issue originally cost 35 cents.

In the Year of Our Lord 2021 you can now major in Classics at Princeton University without learning bonus bona bonum.