Now, the truth is that the higher education does not advance a man’s personal interests except under special circumstances. What it gives a man is the power of expression; but the ability to express himself has kept many a man poor. Let no one imagine that society is likely to reward him for self-expression in any walk of life. He is much more likely to be punished for it. The question of a man’s success in life depends upon society at large. The more highly an age is educated, the more highly it rewards education in the individual. In an age of indifference to learning, the educated man is at a disadvantage. Thus the thesis that education advances self-interest--that thesis upon which many of our colleges are now being conducted--is substantially false. The little scraps and snatches of true education which a man now gets at college often embarrass his career. Our people are finding this out year by year, and as they do so, they naturally throw the true conception of the higher education overboard. If education is to break down as a commercial asset, what excuse have they for retaining it at all? They will force the colleges to live up to the advertisements and to furnish the kind of education that pays its way. It is clear that if the colleges persist in the utilitarian view, the higher learning will disappear. It has been disappearing very rapidly, and can be restored only through the birth of a new spirit and of a new philosophic attitude in our university life. There are ages when the scholar receives recognition during his lifetime and when the paths which lead to his lecture-room are filled with men drawn there by his fame. This situation arises in any epoch when human intellect surges up and asserts itself against tyranny and ignorance. In the past the tyrannies have been political tyrannies, and these have become well understood through the struggles of intellect in the past; but the present commercial tyranny is a new thing and as yet little understood. It lies like a heavy fog of intellectual depression over the whole kingdom of Mammon, and is fed by the smoke from a million factories. The artist works in it, the thinker thinks in it. Even the saint is born in it. The rain of ashes from the nineteenth-century Vesuvius of business seems to be burying all our landscape.