difficult. Whatever you can do, therefore, to make it easy will be worth while in gaining success. EXERCISES I. Why, from the point of view of analysis, is it difficult to select a list of "the greatest ten" living men, or women? Make such a list and then examine its foundations. Is a similar list of novels or plays or symphonies as difficult to make? II. Use any of the following sentences as a nucleus sentence on which to build an informal analysis. 1. The attitude of scientific efficiency is incompatible with feelings of humanity. 2. A college career does not always develop, but in fact often kills, intellectual integrity. 3. The worst enemy of the American Public is the newspaper that for political or business reasons distorts news. 4. Studies are the least valuable of college activities except as they stimulate the imagination. 5. Our Country is so large that a citizen is really justified, mentally and morally, in being provincial. 6. The study of literature in college is, except for the person of no imagination, deadening to the spirit. 7. The fifteen- and twenty-cent magazine is a menace to American life in that its fiction grossly distorts the facts of life. 8. The farmer who wishes to keep his soil in good condition should use legumes as increasers of fertility. 9. The effect of acquisition of land property is always to drive the possessors into the Tory camp. 10. The engineer is a poet who expresses himself in material forms rather than words. III. Make a formal classification, in skeleton form, of any of the following subjects. Then determine what qualities the subject has that indicate how such a classification can be made interesting, either by material or treatment. Then write an analytical theme which shall thoroughly cover the skeleton classification and shall also be attractive. (Compare the classification of Rock Drills (page 115) and Oriental Rugs (page 119) to note the difference in the amount of interest.) 1. Building materials for houses. 2. China dinner-ware. 3. Forms of democratic government. 4. Methods of irrigation in the United States. 5. Types of lyric poetry. 6. Chairs. 7. Commercial fertilizers. 8. Tractors for the farm. 9. Contemporary philosophies of Europe and America. 11. Elevators. 12. Filing systems. 13. Races of men in Europe. 14. Gas ranges. 15. Pianos. 16. Contemporary short stories of the popular magazines. Indicate, in any given subject, how many possible bases for classification you could choose, as, for example, you might classify chairs on the basis of comfort, expense, presence of rockers, upholstery, adaptation to the human figure, material for the seat, shape of back, etc. IV. Analyze any of the following problems, first without recommendation of solution, and second with recommendation as if you were making a report to a committee or employer or officer. 1. Summer work for college students. 2. Keeping informed of world affairs while doing one's college work faithfully. 3. "Outside activities" for college students. 4. Faculty or non-faculty control of college politics. 5. Choosing a college course with relation to intended career in life. 6. Selecting shrubbery for continuous bloom with both red and blue berries in winter. 7. The mail-order houses. 8. Preventing money panics. 9. Dye-manufacture in the United States. 10. Gaining foreign markets. 11. The farmer and the commission merchant. 12. The brand of flour selected for use in large hotels. 13. Color photography. 14. Wind pressure in high buildings. 15. Street pavement. 16. Electrification of railroads. 17. Heating system for an eight-room house. 18. Choice of cereal for children of six, nine, and eleven one girl. 19. Lighting the farmhouse. 20. Creating a high class dairy or sheep herd. 21. Creating an apple (or other fruit) orchard. two boys, 22. Method of shipping potatoes to a distant point, in boxes, barrels, sacks. 23. Best use of a twenty-acre farm near a large city. 24. Investment of $500.00. 25. Best system of bookkeeping for the farmer. 26. Kind of life insurance for a man of twenty. 27. Location of a shoe factory with capital of $250,000.00. 29. Reconciling Shakespeare's works with the known facts of his life. 30. The secret of Thomas Hardy's pessimism. 31. Reconciling narrow religious training with the increased knowledge derived from college. 32. The failure of college courses in English composition to produce geniuses. 33. The creation of a conscientious political attitude in a democracy. 34. Selection of $10,000 worth of books as the nucleus for a small town library. V. Decide upon a controlling purpose for an informal analysis of any of the following subjects, indicate how you hope to make the analysis interesting, state why you choose the basis that you do — and then write the theme. 1. Prejudices, Flirts, Entertainments, Shade-trees, Methods of advertising, Languages, Scholastic degrees, Systems of landscape gardening for small estates, Migratory song birds of North America, Laces. 2. Causes of the Return-to-the-Soil movement, Origins of our dairy cattle, Benefits of intensive agriculture, Imported plant diseases, Legumes. 3. Opportunities for the Civil (or Mechanical or Electrical, etc.) Engineer, Difficulties of modern bridge-building, The relation of the engineer to social movements, The contribution of the engineer to intellectual advance. 4. Changes in the United States system of public finance since Hamilton's time, The equitable distribution of taxation, The benefits of the Federal Reserve Movement in Finance, Forms of taxation, Systems of credit. 5. Possibilities for Physiological Chemistry, Obstacles to color photography, The chemistry of the kitchen, The future of the telescope, The battle against disease germs, Theories of the atom, Heredity in plants or animals, Edible fresh-water fish. 6. Bores, The terrors of childhood, The vanities of young men, Methods of coquetry, of becoming popular, — of always hav ing one's way, The idiosyncrasies of elderly bachelors, Books to read on the train, Acquaintances of the dining-car. VI. Write a 250 word analysis of whatever type you choose on any of the following subjects: The dishonesty of college catalogues, The prevalence of fires in the United States, Causes of weakness in I beams, Effect of fairy stories on children, Religious sectarianism, Public attitude toward an actress, The business man's opinion of the college professor, The tyranny of the teaching of our earliest years, The state of American forests, Municipal wastefulness, Opportunities for lucra tive employment at college or university, The effect of oriental rugs in a room, The attitude of people in a small town toward their young people in college, People who are desolate without the "Movies" four or five times a week. VII. Write a 1500-2000 word analytical theme on any of the following subjects: 1. The Responsibilities of Individualism. 2. American Slavery to the Printed Word. 3. The Ideal Vacation. 4. What Shall We Do with Sunday? 5. The Value of Reading Fiction. 6. Why I am a Republican, or Democrat, or Pessimist, or Agnos- what 7. The Classics and the American Student in the Twentieth Century. 8. The Chief Function of a College. 9. The Decline of Manners. 10. A Defense of Cheap Vaudeville. 11. The Workingman Should Know His Place and Keep It. 12. The Study of History as an Aid to a Critical Estimate of the Present. 13. The Relation of Friendship to Similarity in Point of View. 14. Intellectual Leadership in America. 15. The Present Situation in the World of Baseball. 16. The Reaction of War upon the Finer Sensibilities of Civilians. 17. Patriotism and Intellectual Detachment. 18. The Breeding Place of Social Improvements. 19. Organization in Modern Life. 20. The Conflict of Political and Moral Loyalty. 22. The Stability of American Political Opinion. 23. The Shifting Geography of Intellectual Leadership in the World. VIII. In the following selection what does Mr. Shaw analyze? On what basis? Is he thorough? If not, what does he omit? Does the omission, if there is any, vitally harm the analysis? Passion is the steam in the engine of all religious and moral systems. In so far as it is malevolent, the religions are malevolent too, and insist on human sacrifices, on hell, wrath, and vengeance. You cannot read Browning's Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island, without admitting that all our religions have been made as Caliban made his, and that the difference between Caliban and Prospero is not that Prospero has killed passion in himself whilst Caliban has yielded to it, but that Prospero is mastered by holier passions than Caliban's. Abstract principles of conduct break down in practice because kindness and truth and justice are not duties founded on abstract principles external to man, but human passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher passions as well as with lower ones. If a young woman, in a mood of strong reaction against the preaching of duty and selfsacrifice and the rest of it, were to tell me that she was determined not to murder her own instincts and throw away her life in obedience to a mouthful of empty phrases, I should say to her: "By all means do as you propose. Try how wicked you can be: it is precisely the same experiment as trying how good you can be. At worst you will only find out the sort of person you are. At best you will find that your passions, if you really and honestly let them all loose impartially, will discipline you with a severity which your conventional friends, abandoning themselves to the mechanical routine of fashion, could not stand for a day.” As a matter of fact, we have seen over and over again this comedy of the "emancipated" young enthusiast flinging duty and religion, convention and parental authority, to the winds, only to find herself, for the first time in her life, plunged into duties, responsibilities, and sacrifices from which she is often glad to retreat, after a few years' wearing down of her enthusiasm, into the comparatively loose life of an ordinary respectable woman of fashion.1 Analyze the relation of sincerity to teaching, of intellectual bravery to reading, of subservience to politics, of vitality to creative writing, of broadmindedness to social reform, of sympathy to social judgment. Rewrite Mr. Shaw's article so as to place the sentence which now begins the selection at the end. Is the result an improvement or a drawback? What difference in the reader might make this change advisable? IX. In the light of the following statement of the philosophy of Mr. Arthur Balfour, the English statesman, analyze, into one word if possible, the philosophy of Lincoln, of Bismarck, of Mr. Wilson, of Robert E. Lee, of Webster, of William Pitt, of Burke, of any political thinker of whom you know. In the same way analyze the military policy of Napoleon or Grant or any other general; the social philosophy of Jane Addams, Rousseau, Carlyle, Jefferson, or any other thinker; the creed of personal conduct of Browning, Whitman, Thackeray (as shown in Vanity Fair), or of any other person concerned with the individual. Analyze the effect of such a philosophy as Mr. Balfour's. Analyze the relation of such a philosophy as this to the actively interested personal conduct of the holder of it toward definite personal ends. 1 George Bernard Shaw: The Sanity of Art. By courtesy of the publishers, Boni & Liveright. |