The same story might be told of Yale or any other college. Considered as what are called popular institutions--that is, institutions from which everybody can or does derive some calculable, palpable benefit--the universities of this and every other country are useless, and there ought on this theory to be a prodigious "outcry" against them, and they ought, on the principle of equality, if allowed to exist at all, to be allowed to exist only on condition that they will give a degree, or at least offer an education, to every male citizen of sound mind. But nobody takes this view of them. The poorest and most ignorant hod-carrier would not hold, if asked, that because he cannot go to college there ought to be no colleges. Sensible people in every country acknowledge that a high education can in the nature of things be only obtained by a very small proportion of the population; but that the few who seek it, and can afford to take it, should get it, and should get it of the best quality, they hold to be a public benefit. Now, why a public benefit? The service that Harvard or Yale renders to the community certainly does not lie simply in the fact that it qualifies a thousand young men every year to earn a livelihood. They would earn a livelihood whether they went to college or not. The vast majority of men earn a livelihood without going to college or thinking of it. Indeed, it is doubted by many persons, and with much show of reason, whether a man does not earn it all the more readily for not going to college at all; and as regards the work of the world of all kinds, the great bulk of it is done, and well done, by persons who have not received a university education and do not regret it. So that the benefits which the country derives from the universities consists mainly in the refining and elevating influences which they create, in the taste for study and research which they diffuse, in the social and political ideals which they frame and hold up for admiration, in the confidence in the power of knowledge which they indirectly spread among the people, and in the small though steady contributions they make to that reverence for "things not seen" in which the soul of the state may be said to lie, and without which it is nothing better than a factory or an insurance company.