A doctor cannot afford to depend too freely on experience, valuable though it may be, because the high prices it asks are paid by his patients. But so far as professional training goes, Dr. Goodnow stood on firm ground. All it undertakes to do is to enable students to work along chosen lines--to turn them into doctors, lawyers, priests, mining engineers, analytical chemists, expert accountants. They may or may not be educated men in the liberal sense of the word. They may or may not understand allusions which are current in the conversation of educated people. Such conversation is far from encyclopædic; but it is interwoven with knowledge, and rich in agreeable disclosures. An adroit participant can avoid obvious pitfalls; but it is not in dodging issues and concealing deficits that the pleasures of companionship lie. I once heard a sparkling and animated lady ask Mr. Henry James (who abhorred being questioned) if he did not think American women talked better than English women. “Yes,” said the great novelist gently, “they are more ready and much more brilliant. They rise to every suggestion. But”--as if moved by some strain of recollection--“English women so often know what they are talking about.” Vocational training and vocational guidance are a little like intensive farming. They are obvious measures for obvious results; they economize effort; they keep their goal in view. If they “pander to cabbages,” they produce as many and as fine cabbages as the soil they till can yield. Their exponents are most convincing when they are least imaginative. The Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration says bluntly that it is hard for a young man to see any good in a college education, when he finds he has nothing to offer which business men want. This is an intelligible point of view. It shows, as I have said, that the country does not feel itself rich enough for intellectual luxuries. But when I see it asserted that vocational training is necessary for the safety of Democracy (the lusty nursling which we persist in feeding from the bottle), I feel that I am asked to credit an absurdity. When the reason given for this dependence is the altruism of labour,--“In a democracy the activity of the people is directed towards the good of the whole number,”--I know that common sense has been violated by an assertion which no one is expected to take seriously. A life-career course may be established in every college in the land, and students carefully guarded from the inroads of distracting and unremunerative knowledge; but this praiseworthy thrift will not be practised in the interests of the public. The mechanical education, against which Mr. Lowell has protested sharply, is preëminently selfish. Its impelling motive is not “going over,” but getting on.