At present, I am longing for someone to write a book and call it “What Is Education?” What, as a matter of fact, is education? Every few days someone, in endeavoring to describe and sum up someone else, ends with the clinching statement: “And the strange part of it was that he was a man, or she was a woman, of education.” This is supposed to settle the matter--to arouse in one’s mind a definite image. “He was a man of education,” apparently means something, but what? To me it has come to mean nothing at all. A short time ago I read in the morning paper of a dead body that had been found in the river and taken to the county morgue. “All means of identification had been removed,” wrote the reporter, in commenting on the incident, “but,” he added, “the body was evidently that of a man of education.” And, to me, the remarkable part of this was that the reporter, without doubt, had a hazy idea of what he was trying to express. In the poor, dead, unidentified thing he had discovered and recognized something that, to him, implied “education,” but how he did it, and what it was, I don’t know, because he did not explain. There are in this connection all sorts of questions I hope the author of the book, to which I look forward, will answer. Is, for instance, “a man of education” the same as “an educated man”? Or is one, perhaps, somewhat more--well, more educated than the other? At times both these phrases sound to me as if they meant precisely the same thing, and then again they suddenly, through no wish of mine, develop subtle but important differences that cause first the one and then the other to seem expressive of a higher, a more comprehensive, form of education. Then, too, is there any particular point at which education leaves off and “cultivation” begins? And can a person be “cultivated” without being educated? The words education and cultivation are constantly upon the American tongue, but what do they mean? Or, do they mean something entirely different to everyone who employs them? Every American girl who flirts her way through the high school is “educated,” and it would be indeed a brave man who dared to suggest that she wasn’t. But is she? (Heaven forbid that _I_ should suggest anything; I merely crave information.) And here let me hasten to add that a friend of mine has always maintained, quite seriously, that he likes me in spite of the fact that I am, as he expresses it, “one of the most illiterate persons” of his acquaintance. His acquaintance, it is some slight comfort to remember, is not large, and he is a doctor of philosophy who lectures at one of the great English universities. Not only has he read and studied much, his memory is appalling; he has never forgotten anything. From his point of view I am not “an educated person.” But then, in the opinion of Macaulay, Addison was sadly lacking in cultivation! “He does not appear to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political