Charles W. Eliot

The author, a former president of Harvard, framed the question he believed would decide the war: Would conscripted workers produce as strong an economy as those who could act of their own free will?

“There are too many histories, too many new sciences with applications of great importance, and too many new literatures of high merit which have a variety of modern uses, to permit any one … to believe that Latin can maintain the place it was held for centuries in the youthful training of educated men.”

“More and more, as time goes on, this war develops into a conflict between free institutions and autocratic institutions.”