When, in December, 1883, forty teachers met in New York and organized this Association, Victoria was still on the throne; Tennyson, Ruskin, and Arnold, Holmes, Aldrich, and Louisa Alcott were all blamelessly writing; and great scholars like Kittredge, Lounsbury, Grandgent, March, Hemple, Garnett, and Todd had heretically attained preëminence without the doctorate. It was an unsophisticated, safe, and comfortable world. Today it has undergone disintegration. And we, to a certain degree, have disintegrated with it. Never before, unless I mistake, has it been so important as now, at the close of our first half-century, to take stock. In what direction are we moving, and to what end?

On the afternoon of December 27, just fifty years ago, forty gentlemen assembled at Columbia College, New York City, for the purpose of discussing subjects pertaining to modern language study. Thirty-five of them were from New England and the Middle Atlantic States, two from the South (Virginia and Tennessee), two from Michigan, and one came across the Mississippi—from the city of St. Louis.