“Perhaps we shall wait for business to purge and live cleanly. Then it will have some use for the education of a gentleman.” “I see,” said the banker, “that I have touched the quick in both of you, when I hadn’t the least notion of doing so. But I shouldn’t really like to prophesy which will adapt itself to the other--education or business. Let us hope there will be mutual concessions. There are some pessimists who say that business methods, especially on the large scale of the trusts and combinations, have grown worse instead of better; but this may be merely what is called a ‘transition state.’ Hamlet must be cruel to be kind; the darkest hour comes before dawn--and so on. Perhaps when business gets the whole affair of life into its hands, and runs the republic, as its enemies now accuse it of doing, the process of purging and living cleanly will begin. I have known lots of fellows who started in life rather scampishly; but when they felt secure of themselves, and believed that they could afford to be honest, they became so. There’s no reason why the same thing shouldn’t happen on a large scale. We must never forget that we are still a very novel experiment, though we have matured so rapidly in some respects that we have come to regard ourselves as an accomplished fact. We are really less so than we were forty years ago, with all the tremendous changes since the war. Before that we could take certain matters for granted. If a man got out of work, he turned his hand to something else; if a man failed in business, he started in again from some other direction; as a last resort, in both cases, he went West, pre-empted a quarter-section of public land, and grew up with the country. Now the country is grown up; the public land is gone; business is full on all sides, and the hand that turned itself to something else has lost its cunning. The struggle for life has changed from a free-fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free-fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital. Decidedly, we are in a transition state, and if the higher education tried to adapt itself to business needs, there are chances that it might sacrifice itself without helping business. After all, how much education does business need? Were our great fortunes made by educated men, or men of university training? I don’t know but these young fellows are right about that.” “Yes, that may all be,” I put in. “But it seems to me that you give Mr. Homos, somehow, a wrong impression of our economic life by your generalizations. You are a Harvard man yourself.” “Yes, and I am not a rich man. A million or two, more or less; but what is that? I have suffered, at the start and all along, from the question as to what a man with the education of a gentleman ought to do in such and such a juncture. The fellows who have not that sort of education have not that sort of question, and they go in and win.”