The result of all this is, of course, a general lowering of scholarship in the college. The ruling class is content with passing marks, and has no ambition to excel in scholarship, for it does not feel that the attainment of scholars’ honors confers the distinctions upon it that it desires. In addition, this listlessness for scholarship serves to retard the work of the scholarly portion of the classes; it makes the instructor work harder, and clogs up generally the work of the course. This listlessness may be partly due to another factor in the situation. An ever larger proportion of college students to-day comes from the business class, where fifty years ago it came from the professional class. This means a difference between the intellectual background of the home that the man leaves and of the college to which he comes, very much greater than when college training was still pretty much the exclusive property of the professional man or the solid merchant, and almost an hereditary matter. For, nowadays, probably a majority of undergraduates are sent to college by fathers who have not had a college education themselves, but who, reverencing, as all Americans do, Education if not Learning, are ambitious that their sons shall have its benefits. These parents can well afford to set their sons up handsomely so that they shall lose nothing of the well-rounded training that makes up college life; and although it is doubtful whether their idea of the result is much more than a vague feeling that college will give their boys tone, and polish them off much in the way that the young ladies’ boarding-school polishes off the girls, they are a serious factor to be reckoned with in any discussion of college problems. Most of these young men come thus from homes of conventional religion, cheap literature, and lack of intellectual atmosphere, bring few intellectual acquisitions with them, and, since they are most of them going into business, and will therefore make little practical use of these acquisitions in after life, contrive to carry a minimum away with them. In the college courses and talks with their instructors they come into an intellectual atmosphere that is so utterly different from what they have been accustomed to that, instead of an intellectual sympathy between instructor and student, there ensues an intellectual struggle that is demoralizing to both. The instructor has sometimes to carry on a veritable guerilla warfare of new ideas against the pupils in his courses, with a disintegrating effect that is often far from happy. If he does not disintegrate, he too often stiffens the youth, if of the usually tough traditional cast of mind, into an impregnable resolution that defies all new ideas forever after. This divergence of ideals and attitudes toward life is one of the most interesting complications of scholarship, for it is dramatic and flashes out in the class-room, in aspects at times almost startling.