Whether it is wise or best for the individual and society is difficult to decide; but it is true and very natural indeed that for nearly all of these young persons an education is not greatly worth while if at the end of the college course or soon thereafter it can not be translated into good pay and the material comforts of life. The old ideal of education as an end in itself, as the deepening and broadening of one’s view of life, as the acquiring of a certain amount and kind of culture, has gone from among us. At this university they have, of course, all the usual paraphernalia of fraternities and sororities and “student activities”; also they have an oversupply of what passes for religion in a commercial age. There are five or six hundred instructors, employed to prepare boys and girls for money-making, and a few fond idealists, who struggle to introduce a little understanding of the intellectual life. At this, as at other universities, you hear wailing about the impossibility of getting college students to study; so you would have thought that when a man came along who proved himself a wizard at that art, the harassed authorities would have grappled him to their hearts. I put it to you, overworked and troubled college professor, in whatever part of America you may be: suppose some one put to you the task of getting seventy-five college boys to come to you, begging you to teach them in off hours, and outside the regular classes, and without any credits; offering to rent rooms for the purpose, clean them up themselves, buy lumber and saw it and build benches with their own hands—would you say you know how to do that? Suppose you were asked if you could spend hundreds of hours in intimate association with such students, and never once hear a dirty story, never once hear talk about football or society politics, never see a man light a cigarette—would you say that any man alive could do such a thing? Suppose it were up to you to get yourself invited to the toughest fraternity-house on the campus, to read the Bible to the men between five and six o’clock in the afternoon, and have everybody in the fraternity-house attend, and even bring in crowds from the other fraternity-houses—would you think that could be done in any American university? And if a man were doing all these things, would you say that he ought to be made dean of men, and then, as quickly as possible, president of the university—or would you say that he ought to be fired from the university in disgrace? Of course it would depend; before giving your answer, you have to know whether the man is a Socialist!