 morning to an
inspection of the schools and colleges of the city, with some attempt on his own
part at an explanation of the educational system of the twentieth century.
    »You will see,« said he, as we set out after breakfast, »many very important
differences between our methods of education and yours, but the main difference
is that nowadays all persons equally have those opportunities of higher
education which in your day only an infinitesimal portion of the population
enjoyed. We should think we had gained nothing worth speaking of, in equalizing
the physical comfort of men, without this educational equality.«
    »The cost must be very great,« I said.
    »If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it,« replied
Dr. Leete, »nor even if it took it all save a bare pittance. But in truth the
expense of educating ten thousand youth is not ten nor five times that of
educating one thousand. The principle which makes all operations on a large
scale proportionally cheaper than on a small scale holds as to education also.«
    »College education was terribly expensive in my day,« said I.
    »If I have not been misinformed by our historians,« Dr. Leete answered, »it
was not college education but college dissipation and extravagance which cost so
highly. The actual expense of your colleges appears to have been very low, and
would have been far lower if their patronage had been greater. The higher
education nowadays is as cheap as the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all
other workers, receive the same support. We have simply added to the common
school system of compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred years
ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one and
giving him what you used to call the education of a gentleman, instead of
turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mental equipment beyond
reading, writing, and the multiplication table.«
    »Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of education,« I
replied, »we should not have thought we could afford the loss of time from
industrial pursuits. Boys of the poorer classes usually went to work at sixteen
or younger, and knew their trade at twenty.«
    »We should not concede you any gain even in material product by that plan,«
Dr. Leete replied. »The greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of
labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in
acquiring it.«
    »We should also have been
