It is obvious, except to our “practical” business men, that there are many kinds of work, not only like the arts, needful for humanism, but like pure science, needful for business itself, that can be the fruit only of free time and of the absence of the need to turn the results into immediate cash. Yet here again we run counter to the new business ideals as promulgated by Professor Carver. “Generally with some exceptions,” he writes, “the more useful the person the more he is paid,” adding that “if a pupil shows a special aptitude for a kind of work which is being overdone and poorly paid, to train the pupil for that work would be to condemn him to poverty, and no conscientious educator would care to do[Pg 25] that. He must, in fact, train the pupil for a kind of work which is reasonably well paid.” We need not add the recent dictum of another professor that the best standard of value of a piece of literary work is, after all, what it will fetch in the market, to see how the new leaven of the business ideals of profits and “service” are working in our academic minds. “The greater the service rendered, the greater is the personal income” (we may thus syllogize this idea), “therefore, we can estimate the service in terms of income, and (with no selfish philosophy, of course, only idealism) we must train our boys to make the largest incomes possible so that they may be sure they are rendering the greatest service to society.” Q.E.D. Naturally the business men, whose badge of success is income, applaud such a theory, for it establishes indubitably that the owner of a cigar-store chain is infinitely more valuable to humanity than a Keats, even though from every past civilization the only things which remain of value to humanity are the creative works of those who were not business men. The business men of those days are as forgotten and indistinguishable as the leaves of yesteryears in Vallombrosa. Nothing could bring out more clearly than this barbarous syllogism and philosophy the difference between a humanistic and an economic civilization.