The total value of all gifts and bequests received by all the higher institutions of learning in the United States in the year ending June 30, 1908, was $14,820,955; that is, $179,000 less than the cost of one first class British battleship.[44] If there are forty-five State Universities in the United States with a total of 6,750 teachers (150 each) receiving an average salary of $2,000, their combined salaries are less than the cost of one “Dreadnought.” _Five per cent. interest_ on the cost of one “Dreadnought” would pay the combined salaries of 1,500 country school teachers at $500 per year; or, the combined salaries of 750 country preachers at $1,000 per year. (The average salary of a minister in Massachusetts is less than $800.) ONE PER CENT. INTEREST ON ONE “DREADNOUGHT” WOULD PAY THE COMBINED SALARIES OF THE PRESIDENTS OF TWENTY-FIVE OF THE GREATEST UNIVERSITIES IN THE UNITED STATES—AT AN AVERAGE SALARY OF $6,000 PER YEAR. It is to be remembered, too, that a battleship is out-classed, out of date and useless within fifteen years after it first glides proudly into the water. But education—the systematic development of the intellectual and social powers and tastes, the ripening of the appetites for the deeper, higher, finer forms of life, charging the soul with knowledge and power for pleasure and achievement—education, which is “to the human soul what sculpture is to a block of marble,”—education, in its glorious influences, is immortal. Prize-fighter statesmanship sounds loud and is, therefore, great; looks attractive and is, therefore, splendid—in the judgment of the gullible. Prize-fighter statesmanship rests upon the gullibility of ignorance. Of special importance in this connection is the item of information, furnished in a personal letter to the author of the present volume, by Dr. William T. Harris, who was for many years preceding 1906 our National Commissioner of Education. The information is: _That of all the children in the United States more than 76 in every 100 never enter even the first year of the high school or schools of the high-school grade._ Think of this matter in still another way. The total cost of militarism in the United States for the year 1907–8 was over _six and a half times as great_ as the total income ($66,790,924) of all our 464 universities, colleges and technological schools _from all sources and for all purposes for that same year_.[45] THE TOTAL COST OF MILITARISM IN THE UNITED STATES FOR THE FIFTEEN AND A HALF MONTHS ENDING JUNE 30, 1909, WAS GREATER THAN THE TOTAL VALUE OF ALL THE BOOKS, LIBRARIES, LANDS, GROUNDS, BUILDINGS, FURNITURE, SCIENTIFIC APPARATUS, MACHINERY, AND ALL THE ENDOWMENTS, ALL THE INVESTMENTS AND ALL “PRODUCTIVE FUNDS” OF ALL KINDS BELONGING TO ALL OUR 464 HIGHER INSTITUTIONS OF LEARNING.