did. Their happiest fate was to marry the town dentist or doctor, the

clerk in the bank, the owner of the garage. Their highest ambition in life would be to send their children to Chippewa. The men in the College of Arts were generally serving time, taking the prerequisites to get them into the professional schools, or lazy boys content to loaf for four years before they settled down into business.” As to the college life, the cheap toggery shops with the “cheap sport” clothes, the yet cheaper movies with student cat-calls at risqué incidents, the college “activities,” do we not know them all too well as Miss Neff portrays them? Does this sort of thing, which is common enough all over the United States, go to make that “center of robust intellectual life” that Dr. Angell offers as the only alternative to “the life of the upper classes, whatever that may mean in America”? No, the choice is not between the “children of the upper classes” on the one hand, and “all those who possess qualifications of mind and character” on the other, but between those of all classes who have the desire and capacity for genuine education and those, again, of all classes who desire merely the social or economic benefit to be derived from the possession of a college diploma. If, as he says, the effort to answer his questions “will doubtless keep the educational pendulum swinging vigorously for many a day to come,” all I can say is that the heads of our educational leaders are more bemused than even I have ever claimed them to be.

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living. In the old days we learned how to do it mainly in the shop or on the farm or by practice in the office of merchant, lawyer, or doctor. In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings. It is merely learning how to make a living. Culture is essential in order to enable us to know how to live and how to get the best out of living, and a liberal education should help us on our way to acquire it, albeit the acquisition is a lifelong process. “Culture” is a much misused word and has come to have a very feminine and anæmic connotation in America. There have been innumerable definitions, but we may quote one of Matthew Arnold’s as being as suggestive as any for our purpose. He speaks of culture as “a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature.” This is far removed from giving the degree of Bachelor of Arts to a student who has learned how to truss and dress poultry or has compassed the mysteries of how to sell real estate and run an apartment house.

Of course, life is short and getting rich is long—or may be. Many people who go to college to-day, aside from their lack of _desire_ for education, have no _time_ for it, because it does not lead immediately to “power and service.” This, to be sure, is nothing new. What _is_ new is that a large proportion of the colleges have opened their arms to all such and have deceived them into believing that when they have gotten an olla-podrida of ill-digested information of a scientific and cultural sort, with the practical courses to teach them how to earn a better living more quickly, they have acquired a liberal education and are entitled to consider themselves Bachelors or Masters of Arts. The words, indeed, have come to signify as little as “gentleman” or “lady.”

It all comes back, like most things, to the question of values—of what is worth while, of what is the good life. Should we learn French in order to impress the boss? Should we pick up scraps from collections of the classics in order to make a hit at Mrs. Jones’s party and impress her guests? One of the most sympathetic of foreign critics and observers of American life, a man who has spent much time among us, recently said that one feeling he always had here was that all our goods were in our shop windows and there was nothing behind. I believe this criticism is all too true. We are so busy _doing_ that we have no time to _be_. We all have almost forgotten what it is to _be_. We all have motor cars but no place to go. At present what we need above all else in America is education—not the infinitely variegated supply of courses that make a college catalogue look like Sears, Roebuck’s, but a liberal education that will enable us to create a scale of values for our experiences and to take a philosophical attitude toward the complex reality about us.

If it be complained that most people have no time for an education that does not give immediate results, I again reply that that is their misfortune and has nothing to do with the matter. It is extremely unfortunate, if they are really capable of being educated, that they have no time for it; but, that being so, why tell them they _are_ educated? Why not face the problem frankly and divide education (and degrees) into the two sections that I have suggested, the one to teach people how to make a living and the other to give them a _liberal_ education, to teach them how to live, how to develop all those powers within themselves that make for the beauty and worth of life? If everyone in a democracy cannot have such an education (and a degree), neither can everyone have some of the other good things—a million dollars, or the talent that makes him a poet or painter or president of an advertising company.

IV

Is it not time that we stopped marking down all our spiritual goods to the price that the lowest in the cultural scale can pay? In the seventeenth century the lower middle class in Holland became very prosperous and there was a great demand for small paintings to adorn their new houses. As one of the historians of their art writes, instead of improving the quality of the art, this situation brought about a deterioration, because of the simple rule that “a large uneducated demand in any field can never produce anything but a glut of inferior commodity.”

Whether a democracy can last is problematic, but it is certain it cannot last if there are no leaders above the general level. How are we to train them? Is it by training men solely for a particular calling—medicine, engineering, running a locomotive, or laundering collars? Or are we to give, to some at least, an education in which doing is subordinated to being, in which the development of intelligence and character shall be held superior to passing an examination in philosophy after reading novels for nine months, or learning how to truss and dress poultry? Sir Arthur Keith recently said, speaking of English education, that “it is self-discipline; the formation of character in making man’s higher centers masters of his cerebral establishments.” However it may be brought about—and that is something for the educators to decide (though they seem woefully at sea about it)—what the leaders of our civilization need in education is to be taught to _be_ something, rather than merely how to _do_ something.

In America, if I may repeat, far more than in Europe, the soul of the people depends upon the culture to be obtained by a genuinely liberal education. In Europe, in a sense, culture lies about one, for, in another definition of Arnold’s, it is “contact with the best that has been thought and said.” I happen to be writing this before my fire in London. Any errand that takes me into the streets—a visit to my agent in Fleet Street, a trip down into the City, a stroll through Whitehall—stirs more historical questions than a month in college could answer. Three minutes in one direction will take me to the marvelous collection of the Dutch masters gathered here for the time being from all the world. Ten minutes in a bus and I have the wonders of the Elgin marbles and the choicest sculpture of Greece for the asking. I am planning an ordinary week-end trip which in a few hours will take me to France or Holland, where entirely new sets of impressions and questions of every sort—æsthetic, historic, racial—will be aroused in spite of myself.

It is far easier here, as I well know from years spent on both sides of the world, to stress _being_ instead of _doing_ than it is in any corner of my native land. In America not only is it almost impossible to get into contact with “the best that has been said and thought,” save through books alone, but _doing_ has been exalted into a national cult and _being_ is despised by public opinion as something enervating and almost disgraceful for a man to consider, something tainted with the idea of “idleness-and-leisure,” which are usually hyphenated in America.

“Power and service.” But of what earthly use is power unless it is to produce or secure something worth while, and of what use is service unless it is to serve some desirable end? In so far as any ideal is considered an end in America, it is the ideal of “a better life for everyone of every class”; but that merely puts off the question one stage further. What is a better life? Are not power and service merely _means_, just as are dynamos or locomotives? And what can the end be except a state of _being_ desirable to man? And should it not be the aim of education to help us learn what that end, that desirable state of being, is, and how to attain to it as far as the imperfect nature of man will allow?

We have been “doing” for three hundred years. We have cleared and settled a continent. We have accumulated the most colossal store of material power and resources the world has ever seen. Is it not time that we began to think what to do with all our means, what the end is that we wish to attain? If we are not to do it _now_, when, in Heaven’s name, are we _ever_ going to be rich and prosperous enough to do it? We have always given as an excuse for our cultural barrenness that we have had to lay the material foundations first. But how can that excuse be given any more, when we are the richest nation in the world, and we are told, until we are almost sick of hearing it, that all classes enjoy the highest standard of material comfort in the history of the race? Are we forever to continue getting more things in order to get more things with which to get more things, and so on _ad infinitum_? Are we forever to seek the means without ever considering the end for which we seek them? Is there any sense in _doing_ if we are never to _become_ something, to _be_ something, as a result? The entire practical life in America urges us to do unceasingly and unthinkingly. Should it not be one of the chief functions of education to find the strands of meaning in our ceaseless web of doing and to teach us some purpose in our lives? Can anything give us that purpose better than culture, in the sense first defined above? Can that culture be attained by a “liberal education” that permits “business organization,” “fire insurance,” “business psychology,” or “personnel administration” to be substituted at the whim of the student for literature, art, science, history or philosophy?

Does not our whole educational muddle spring in part from mob snobbery—from exactly the same mental attitude that makes the laboring class talk of “colored wash-ladies” and “garbage gentlemen,” that makes them want to be dubbed Bachelors of Art after studying business English and typewriting, ever gaining heaven by serving earth? Does it not also spring in part from the lack of character and of a coherent philosophy of life among those who should be our educational leaders? To the latter, in taxes and endowments, we are giving money reckoned in hundreds of millions. We are giving them also a hundred million years or so of the lives of our young in every generation. In exchange, what are they returning to us in national ideals and culture? Is it not a fair question?