This situation would be bad enough were it limited to the public school and state university systems; but, as a competent critic has recently pointed out, too many of the private colleges and universities have “gathered up their academic gowns” and run after the mob “offering academic standing to anything for which there is a popular demand.” Democracy, universal education, and high wages in the laboring class have had another unfortunate influence upon education by swamping our institutions with students who, although some are admirable, have in all too many instances no background at all, no desire to be really educated, and no power of becoming so. For this reason there has been a general movement during the past five years to simplify the wording of textbooks in all the higher grades of school, and even in our universities a professor has to choose his words with great care. I am told that even at Harvard a professor dare not speak of a king as having been “crowned,” for fear that the students will think he has been knocked on the head! Thus a student coming from a home with cultural background, with an intelligent mind, and a desire to learn, has to be held back to a pace no faster than can be kept by the son of an ironpuddler or a carpenter. This is no negligible point. As the Greeks said, “One comes to limp who walks with the lame.” The attempt to bring about mass production in education has thrown enormous responsibility[Pg 158] upon, and created almost insoluble problems for, our educational leaders. A few generations ago the larger number of students in our higher educational institutions either came from well-to-do homes or else were boys of unusual gifts or ambitions. If a boy is really to receive the foundation of a liberal education by the time of his graduation from college, it is evident that what the college has to teach the boy who comes from one class of society is quite different from what it has to teach one from another. Education is far from being a mere matter of “book learning”, though many are apt so to consider it. A person is far from being “educated” when his mind has merely been crammed with facts for four or even seven years.