Education: How Old The NewWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Education: How Old The New
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Education -- History
It is worth while analyzing that proposition a little and applying it
to present-day conditions as we know them. After all we have been
turning out a large number of those who have had the benefit of the
higher education from our colleges and universities during the last
generation or so. They have gone out by the thousand to influence
their fellows and presumably to be shining lights for profound
improvement of life, striking examples that surely will prove an
incentive and a source of emulation to others to do the right, avoid
the wrong, be helpful instead of selfish and, in general, show the
world how much education means for the happiness of all. There is a
slang expression familiar in New York just now that you in New England
may not know, for I understand that even the owls near Boston do not
say "to-whit-to-whoo" but "to-whit-to-whoom," that may be quoted here:
"Some men are born good, {409} some make good and some are caught with
the goods on them." Not all of the graduates of colleges and
universities were born good, of course. I wonder what we shall find
with regard to the other two phases of existence. There are not a few
who are critically perverse enough to say that, while many have made
good, too many have been caught with the goods on them.
Let us take the subject that is so strikingly brought before us in our
everyday life in recent years, the question of political corruption.
Of course it is to be presumed that it is the non-college men who are
both corruptors and corrupted. It is, of course, just as confidently
to be presumed, on the other hand, that it is the college men who are
the forerunners in all the exposures of recent years. Alas! for human
nature, it is just the contrary. The leaders in big corruption, the
mainstays of what has come to be called "big political business," have
nearly all been college men. This has been true in California, in
Missouri, in Pennsylvania, in New York, in Illinois. It would be easy
to add other states, but I am only mentioning those where
investigations are not yet forgotten, though we American people have
cultivated a really marvellous power of forgetting. The states are
sufficiently far apart from one another to make it very clear that the
condition is not limited to a particular locality but is practically
universal. In recent years we have been getting closer to the {410}
man higher up. In a great many of the cases, I should say in a
majority of them, he has proved to be a university man, and if not,
then university men have been his right hands in the accomplishment of
evil. The boards of directors of corporations, life insurance, fire
insurance, railroads, great industries and manufactures, even banks,
who have known that laws were being violated and who have not cared
because it was money in their pockets, have in many cases, perhaps
even in the majority of cases, been college men. Certainly college
graduates have not proved to be the little leaven that would leaven
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