afraid,« said I, »that a high education, while it
adapted men to the professions, would set them against manual labor of all
sorts.«
    »That was the effect of high education in your day, I have read,« replied
the doctor; »and it was no wonder, for manual labor meant association with a
rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people. There is no such class now. It was
inevitable that such a feeling should exist then, for the further reason that
all men receiving a high education were understood to be destined for the
professions or for wealthy leisure, and such an education in one neither rich
nor professional was a proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence of
failure, a badge of inferiority rather than superiority. Nowadays, of course,
when the highest education is deemed necessary to fit a man merely to live,
without any reference to the sort of work he may do, its possession conveys no
such implication.«
    »After all,« I remarked, »no amount of education can cure natural dulness or
make up for original mental deficiencies. Unless the average natural mental
capacity of men is much above its level in my day, a high education must be
pretty nearly thrown away on a large element of the population. We used to hold
that a certain amount of susceptibility to educational influences is required to
make a mind worth cultivating, just as a certain natural fertility in soil is
required if it is to repay tilling.«
    »Ah,« said Dr. Leete, »I am glad you used that illustration, for it is just
the one I would have chosen to set forth the modern view of education. You say
that land so poor that the product will not repay the labor of tilling is not
cultivated. Nevertheless, much land that does not begin to repay tilling by its
product was cultivated in your day and is in ours. I refer to gardens, parks,
lawns, and, in general, to pieces of land so situated that, were they left to
grow up to weeds and briers, they would be eyesores and inconveniencies to all
about. They are therefore tilled, and though their product is little, there is
yet no land that, in a wider sense, better repays cultivation. So it is with the
men and women with whom we mingle in the relations of society, whose voices are
always in our ears, whose behavior in innumerable ways affects our enjoyment, -
who are, in fact, as much conditions of our lives as the air we breathe, or any
of the physical elements on