“It takes a much better quality of mind for self-education than for education in the ordinary sense,” says Mrs. Gerould; and no one will dispute this truth. Franklin had two years of schooling, and they were over and done with before he was twelve. His “cultural opportunities” were richer than those enjoyed by Mr. Gompers, and he had a consuming passion for knowledge. Vocational training was a simple thing in his day; but he glimpsed its possibilities, and fitted it into place. He would have made an admirable “vocational counsellor” in the college he founded, had his counsels not been needed on weightier matters, and in wider spheres. As for industrial education, those vast efficiency courses given by leading manufacturers to their employees, which embrace an astonishing variety of marketable attainments, they would have seemed to him like the realization of a dream--a dream of diffused light and general intelligence. We stand to-day on an educational no man’s land, exposed to double fires, and uncertain which way to turn for safety. The elimination of Greek from the college curriculum blurred the high light, the supreme distinction, of scholarship. The elimination of Latin as an essential study leaves us without any educational standard save a correct knowledge of English, a partial knowledge of modern languages, and some acquaintance, never clearly defined, with precise academic studies. The scientist discards many of these studies as not being germane to his subject. The professional student deals with them as charily as possible. The future financier fears to embarrass his mind with things he does not need to know. Yet back of every field of labour lies the story of the labourer, and back of every chapter in the history of civilization lie the chapters that elucidate it. “Wisdom,” says Santayana, “is the funded experience which mankind has gathered by living.” Education gives to a student that fraction of knowledge which sometimes leads to understanding and a clean-cut basis of opinions. The process is engrossing, and, to certain minds, agreeable and consolatory. Man contemplates his fellow man with varied emotions, but never with unconcern. “The world,” observed Bagehot tersely, “has a vested interest in itself.” The American Laughs It was the opinion of Thomas Love Peacock--who knew whereof he spoke--that “no man should ask another why he laughs, or at what, seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a responsible agent.... Reason is in no way essential to mirth.”