My address this year deals with much the same subject as the Presidential Address of 1944, but from a slightly different and, I fear, less practical point of view. Dr. Pickard Cambridge knows the schools, the universities and the whole educational system far better than I do, and was able to make practical suggestions of real value. I am falling back upon the more general and preliminary question why we should pursue Greek studies at all, and indeed why this Society should not peacefully cease upon the midnight with as little pain as may be convenient. The worst of it is that I know that I am prejudiced; and probably almost everybody in the room shares my prejudices. My appeal is really being made to-day to those who do not need it. I am an old man, and therefore probably attached to the old system. I am speaking on behalf of my own studies, and can hardly help feeling that ‘there is nothing like leather.’ To take a broader and more political line, I belong to the old peaceful world, which could afford to be cultured and liberal and to support a class whose interests were in the pursuit of the higher values, and who, while they lived for the most part industriously and modestly, were not in any feverish anxiety about salaries and wages. That cultivated middle class has been exterminated in many parts of Europe and weakened everywhere, everywhere with disastrous consequences. Even in this country a Minister of the Crown has told us that our day is over; a new and more powerful ‘governing class’ is in the saddle. We do not know how much patience it will have with pursuits that are not economically justified.