In the United States, at least, the feeling that everybody ought to be doing something useful is so established that there is no influential class within which idleness is respectable. Whatever narrowness there may be in this spirit, in the way of undervaluing activities whose usefulness is of an inobvious sort, it is sound on the whole and does incalculable service in redeeming riches from vulgarity and corruption. If it be true, as is asserted, that the children of the wealthy, with us, are on the whole less given to sloth and vice than the same class in older countries, the reason is to be found in a healthier, more organic state of public opinion which penetrates all classes with the perception that the significance of the individual lies in his service to the whole. That this sentiment is gaining in our colleges is evident to those who know anything of these institutions. Studies that throw light on the nature and working of society, past or present, and upon the opportunities of service or distinction which it offers to the individual, are rapidly taking the place, for purposes of culture, of studies whose human value is less, or not so apparent. Classes in history—political, industrial and social—in economics, in government and administration, in sociology and ethics, in charities and penology, are larger year by year. And the young people, chiefly from the well-to-do classes, who seek these studies, are one and all adherents of the democratic idea that privilege must be earned by function.