This 1967 MLA presidential address summarizes the development of the Association and American scholarship during the eight years of the Executive Secretaryship of George Winchester Stone, Jr.: the production of floods of scholarship, the entrance of the MLA into national politics through the Foreign Language Program and NDEA, the development of the International Bibliography, production of endless professional pamphlets and policy statements. These scholarly and professional tasks resemble the unending labors of Sisyphus. The humanistic achievements of the scholar are still the most important. Each generation of humanistic scholars must redefine for itself and try to explain to a wider audience the values of literary and linguistic study. Despite the loss of purpose, floundering, sense of apathy and protest evident in post-war creative literature, American scholarship in all languages and of all periods is now at a peak. Americans have given back to Europe its greatest literary products of the past enriched by modern principles of editing, annotation, criticism, and analysis. American scholars move into the next century hand in hand with mechanical aids of tremendous value to liberate rather than enslave them. The one stone that Sisyphus had to roll has exploded and fragmented. The task devolving upon us is now tenfold. In our pursuit of minutiae in scholarship we will demolish all humanistic values unless we keep in the forefront of our consciousness the ten huge stones which challenge us: the new ignorance, muddleheadedness, bigness, crassness, rapidity of change, salvation of the good results of years of permissiveness, repossession of broad scholarship, realignment of new knowledge, pursuit of excellence, and above all assurance of relevance.