“Not on your life,” says the educational wizard. “He wants something he never saw before; he’s going in for culture. You know I specialize in these old things—Hebrew and Greek and Assyrian and Sanskrit and Egyptian——” “How would it do to give him a row of pyramids?” says the architectural wizard. “No,” says the educational wizard, “he would think that was heathen. He’s a religious old bird—a Baptist, like me; that’s how I got him, in fact—met him at an ice cream festival.” “Oh, well then, it’s plain,” says the architectural wizard. “What we want is real old Gothic—stained-glass windows, mullioned, and crenellated battlements, and moated draw-bridges—” “That sounds great!” says the educational wizard. “What does it look like?” “I’ll have one of my office boys get you up a sketch this afternoon,” says the architectural wizard. “It’s a good style from our point of view, because it uses about four times as much stone per square foot of floor-space, and stone is where we get our rake-off.” A thousand years ago, you understand, men rode over the earth, clad in heavy iron armor, like hard-shell crabs. Every joint had to be tightly covered, lest a flying arrow should pierce the crack; and when they built themselves homes they were moved by this same terror of swift arrows, so they made the windows narrow and deep. They built the walls of thick stone to withstand the pounding of battering-rams, and to hold up the enormous weight of the pile. Such was the origin of “Gothic” architecture; and I do not know any better way to expose to you the elaborate system of buncombe which is called “higher education” than to state that here in twentieth century America, where we know of bows and arrows only in poetry, and have the materials and the skill to build structures of steel and glass, big and airy and bright as day—we deliberately go and reproduce the architectural monstrosities, the intellectual and spiritual deformities of a thousand years ago, and compel modern chemists and biologists and engineers to do their research work by artificial light, for fear of arrows which ceased to fly when the last Indian was penned up in a reservation. Not alone at the University of Chicago do you find stone towers with crenellated battlements—that is, notches through which arrows may be fired, and stones and flaming Standard Oil hurled down; you find them at college after college all over the United States. I look up some pictures I happen to have—here they are at Princeton and at Syracuse and at Colorado! You find Columbia University spending several millions for a huge Roman temple of white marble, called a library—a structure which is magnificent for picture post-card purposes, but which gives about ten per cent of the shelf-room that should have been bought for the money, and compels everybody in the main reading-room to use electric lights most of the day!