More than half a million students are to-day studying in our secondary schools and institutions of higher learning, with a money expense to the nation involving many millions dollars. Tens of thousands of teachers and trained educators are devoting years of hard and faithful service in preparing these American youths for life. Are these students, after graduation, assuming real leadership? Are they contributing vision, judgment, and guidance in great national enterprises sufficiently definite and valuable to compensate the country for the sacrifices in time, money, and life that are made for the support and continuance of our educational institutions? There seems to be a difference of opinion concerning this subject even in these times of vast educational enterprises. A business man of high repute wrote to me recently as follows: I do not consider that our colleges are meeting the requirements of modern business life. From your own observation you must know that the most conspicuously successful people in business were conspicuously poor at the start, both financially and educationally. Grover Cleveland, who was not a college graduate, once said that the perpetuity of our institutions and the public welfare depended upon the simple _business-like_ arrangement of the affairs of the Government. This is the frequently expressed opinion of men of business and affairs, who present the successful careers of self-made men as an argument against collegiate education. This argument, however, fails to take into account that the same dogged persistence which has brought success to many of our present-day leaders in industrial and national life would have lost nothing in efficiency by college training. Ask these masters of the business world who have risen by their individual force what they most regret in life. In nine cases out of ten the answer will be, “The lack of an opportunity for education.” And they will usually add: “But my sons shall have an education. _They_ shall not be handicapped as I have been.” For the practical proof of the genuineness of this feeling, one has simply to read over the names in the catalogues of the great universities and colleges of America, where the names of the sons of virtually all the great business and professional men will be found.