One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a friend of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself a graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic and humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the "Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to whom, in this place, I am glad to my gratitude after all these many years. While we were deep in the history of One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a friend of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself a graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic and humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the "Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to whom, in this place, I am glad to confess my gratitude after all these many years. While we were deep in the history of Pendennis we were also being dragged through the Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar, through the Latin and Greek grammars, through Xenophon, and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing play of Euripides, the "Phoenissae." I can never say how much I detested these authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from being attractive. Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing to say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner. Then Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems arid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in Cowper, instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observations on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school-work of those days was repugnant. One's English education was all got out of school.

"having achieved what men may, have borne what men must." This is the very burden of life, and the last word of tragedy. For now all is vain: courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the goodness of Nicias, the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended, all wasted, nothing of that brave venture abides, except torture, defeat, and death. No play not poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin of a people; no modern story can stir us, with all its eloquence, like the brief gravity of this ancient history. Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom more wise than that which bids us do what men may, and bear what men must. Such are the lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, in the morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried in words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph, hope and despair. The world, since their day, has but followed in the same round, which only seems new: has only made the same experiments, and failed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.

One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after winning the friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus. One's application was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate scholar.

I to having learned the classical languages, I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly imperfect accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mind and my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and "The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and I do not regret it. Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in no way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate intelligence. The true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I respect him; but there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbal niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened into true scholarship. Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, and with the malady of being "idle, careless little boys," the ancient classics have a value for which there is no substitute. There is a charm in finding ourselves--our common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of men severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf of historical time--which no other literary pleasure can equal. Then there is to be added, as the university preacher observed, "the pleasure of despising our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek." Doubtless in that there is great consolation.

As then-chair of the Bank Viktor Gerashchenko said in his speech at the seventh congress of people's deputies, the system of [Klepov] As then-chair of the Central Bank Viktor Gerashchenko said in his speech at the seventh congress of people's deputies, the financial system of the Central Bank was in collapse, practically it was stopped. As one could have predicted, chaos expected us, government reshuffle and so on. It became clear that we should protect ourselves immediately. But how? They were supposed to build a new well-protected system of 1,800 new branches of cash calculation centers and restore the Russian financial system soon. The Central Bank turned to us with this task.

REGNUM: Why was it you?

Because protection was to be done professionally, fast and for sure. And the most important thing: the equipment needed to be mass and not expensive. Like Kalashnikov machine gun during the war. We could provide it, as we have a production plant in Zelenograd (not far from Moscow).