Such advertisements are typical, and are worthy of note because they indicate something of the nature of the prevailing American interest in education. Here is an illustration of a domestic scene: The man stands at the door dejected. He has just been discharged from his position, and has come home to tell his wife. She sympathetically replies that he ought long ago to have bought that course of lessons. Or she consoles him with the question, “Why is it that all the others have gone ahead and you have not?” By contrast there is a series of invitations to enter the temple of knowledge in which a wife is portrayed leaning affectionately over her husband’s shoulder. He holds a pay envelope in his hand and says, “I am making real money now.” It is well, when telling people of the advantages of education, to give them an idea of the conversation which takes place in the homes of the cultured. But that anyone should seriously enter upon a course of study of the world’s classics in order that he may impress people with his knowledge, appear genteel, make himself attractive to women or gain entrance to an exclusive social set, is, I believe, a distinctly modern contribution to educational theory. There recently came into my possession half a shelf of little old books bound in leather. They contain a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, some novels of Fielding and Smollet, and a book or two of seventeenth century religious meditations. The volumes are discolored with age and are worn with much reading, broken bindings are carefully repaired with hand stitching and torn pages pasted together by someone who prized and reverenced their content. They are part of the small library of a New England farmer of the early years of the Republic, who read his books by his kitchen fireside when the day’s work was done, who lived with them for years, and found in them a perpetual source of interest and wisdom and a refuge in an existence of loneliness and toil. Imagine anyone trying to sell that man a work of art with the promise that a casual reading of it would enable him to appear more cultivated than he really was. Today a much advertised and in fact admirable selection of classic literature is offered with precisely this appeal. A full page display appears in the Sunday papers depicting a gaudy dining-room with three people conventionally dressed for dinner seated at the table. There are two men and a beautiful woman. She is talking to the man on her right, and is evidently fascinated with his brilliant conversation. The man on the left sits dumb and miserable and unnoticed; he can not join in such sophisticated and scintillating discussion. We are informed that the poor man has neglected to read his fifteen minutes a day. It is to this sort of thing that popular utilitarianism, aided and appealed to by commercialism, would divert a hesitating interest in education.