All this school machinery is only machinery. Back of it must be men--great men. I am anxious that the modern school have the modern equipment demanded to serve the present age. But I am more anxious that each student come in vital touch with great men. We get life from life, not from laboratories, and we have life more abundantly as our lives touch greater lives. A school is vastly more than machinery, methods, microscopes and millions. Many a small school struggling to live thinks that all it needs is endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in the financial prosperity that has engulfed them. Can we keep men before millions, and keep our ideals untainted by foundations? That is the question the age is asking. You and I are very much interested in the answer. Chapter VII The Salvation of a "Sucker" The Fiddle and the Tuning HOW long it takes to learn things! I think I was thirty-four years learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I have not yet learned it. Every few days I stumble over it somewhere. For that sentence utters one of the fundamentals of life that underlies every field of activity. What is knowing? One day a manufacturer took me thru his factory where he makes fiddles. Not violins--fiddles. A violin is only a fiddle with a college education. I have had the feeling ever since that you and I come into this world like the fiddle comes from the factory. We have a body and a neck. That is about all there is either to us or to the fiddle. We are empty. We have no strings. We have no bow--yet! When the human fiddles are about six years old they go into the primary schools and up thru the grammar grades, and get the first string--the little E string. The trouble is so many of these human fiddles think they are an orchestra right away. They want to quit school and go fiddling thru life on this one string! We must show these little fiddles they must go back into school and go up thru all the departments and institutions necessary to give them the full complement of strings for their life symphonies. After all this there comes the commencement, and the violin comes forth with the E, A, D and G strings all in place. Educated now? Why is a violin? To wear strings? Gussie got that far and gave a lot of discord. The violin is to give music. So there is much yet to do after getting the strings. All the book and college can do is to give the strings--the tools. After that the violin must go into the great tuning school of life. Here the pegs are turned and the strings are put in tune. The music is the knowing. Learning is tuning. You do not know what you have memorized, you know what you have vitalized, what you have written in the book of experience.