“Power and service.” But of what earthly use is power unless it is to produce or secure something worth while, and of what use is service unless it is to serve some desirable end? In so far as any ideal is considered an end in America, it is the ideal of “a better life for everyone of every class”; but that merely puts off the question one stage further. What is a better life? Are not power and service merely means, just as are dynamos or locomotives? And what can the end be except a state of being desirable to man? And should it not be the aim of education to help us learn what that end, that desirable state of being, is, and how to attain to it as far as the imperfect nature of man will allow? We have been “doing” for three hundred years. We have cleared and settled a continent. We have accumulated the most colossal store of material power and resources the world has ever seen. Is it not time that we began to think what to do with all our means, what the end is that we wish to attain? If we are not to do it now, when, in Heaven’s[Pg 174] name, are we ever going to be rich and prosperous enough to do it? We have always given as an excuse for our cultural barrenness that we have had to lay the material foundations first. But how can that excuse be given any more, when we are the richest nation in the world, and we are told, until we are almost sick of hearing it, that all classes enjoy the highest standard of material comfort in the history of the race? Are we forever to continue getting more things in order to get more things with which to get more things, and so on ad infinitum? Are we forever to seek the means without ever considering the end for which we seek them? Is there any sense in doing if we are never to become something, to be something, as a result? The entire practical life in America urges us to do unceasingly and unthinkingly. Should it not be one of the chief functions of education to find the strands of meaning in our ceaseless web of doing and to teach us some purpose in our lives? Can anything give us that purpose better than culture, in the sense first defined above? Can that culture be attained by a “liberal education” that permits “business organization,” “fire insurance,” “business psychology,” or “personnel administration” to be substituted at the whim of the student for literature, art, science, history or philosophy?