At the end of the eighteenth century the Encyclopedists in France, in their great campaign for the diffusion of information among the people and the spread of what they were pleased to call education, though some of us are prone to think that they hopelessly confused the distinction between education for power and education for information, confidently promised that when men knew enough, poverty, of course, would disappear and in its train would go all the attendant evils, {407} vice and crime and immorality, and with them, of course, unhappiness would disappear from the world. That is considerably over a century now, but we have not found it advisable as yet to do away with courts of law, nor jails, nor policemen, nor any of the mechanism of the law for the suppression of crime and immorality. Indeed, there are those who are unkind enough to say, that we now have to make use of more means than ever in proportion to the population for the suppression of vice and crime, and that they are more emphatically demanded even than at the time of the Encyclopedists. As for unhappiness and poverty, recent investigations in our large cities show so large a proportion of people willing yet unable to obtain a decent living wage, that it is quite startling. Our insane asylums are growing much more rapidly than the population, and not a few of the inmates are there because of immorality. Suicide is on the increase faster than the population and unfortunately the greatest increase is noted in the younger years. It is between fifteen and twenty-five that suicides are multiplying. Of course the answer to this is, that education is not as yet carried to that extent among the great mass of people which would enable it to have its full beneficial effects. Our common school education is not enough to bring people under the beneficent influence of this great civilizing factor for the development of mankind. {408} Educators would urge that it is the higher education which serves to obliterate the ills that human flesh is heir to, moral as well as physical, as far, of course, as that is possible in so imperfect a world as this. If we could but extend the advantages of the higher education, of college and university training to the majority of the people, then say the advocates of education as a panacea for human ills, we would surely have that approach to the millennium which intellectual development by the diffusion of information can and must give.