“I don’t believe, however, that the higher education is any more of a failure, as a provision for a business career, than the lower education is for the life of labor. I suppose that the hypercritical observer might say that in a wholly commercial civilization like ours the business man really needed nothing beyond the three R’s, and the working-man needed no R at all. As a practical affair, there is a good deal to be said in favor of that view. The higher education is part of the social ideal which we have derived from the past, from Europe. It is part of the provision for the life of leisure, the life of the aristocrat, which nobody of our generation leads, except women. Our women really have some use for the education of a gentleman, but our men have none. How will that do for a generalization?” the banker asked of me. “Oh,” I admitted, with a laugh, “it is a good deal like one of my own. I have always been struck with that phase of our civilization.” “Well, then,” the banker resumed, “take the lower education. That is part of the civic ideal which, I suppose, I may say we evolved from the depths of our inner consciousness of what an American citizen ought to be. It includes instruction in all the R’s, and in several other letters of the alphabet. It is given free by the state, and no one can deny that it is thoroughly socialistic in conception and application.” “Distinctly so,” said the professor. “Now that the text-books are furnished by the state, we have only to go a step further and provide a good, hot lunch for the children every day, as they do in Paris.” “Well,” the banker returned, “I don’t know that I should have much to say against that. It seems as reasonable as anything in the system of education which we force upon the working classes. _They_ know perfectly well, whether we do or not, that the three R’s will not make their children better mechanics or laborers, and that, if the fight for a mere living is to go on from generation to generation, they will have no leisure to apply the little learning they get in the public schools for their personal culture. In the mean time we deprive the parents of their children’s labor, in order that they may be better citizens for their schooling, as we imagine; I don’t know whether they are or not. We offer them no sort of compensation for their time, and I think we ought to feel obliged to them for not wanting wages for their children while we are teaching them to be better citizens.” “You know,” said the professor, “that has been suggested by some of their leaders.” “No, really? Well, that is too good!” The banker threw back his head and roared, and we all laughed with him. When we had sobered down again, he said: “I suppose that when a working-man makes all the use he can of his lower education he becomes a business man, and then he doesn’t need the higher. Professor, you seem to be left out in the cold by our system, whichever way you take it.”