es of life. You, I am afraid, will
have to doctor those yourself."

"I see." Hugh didn't altogether see. Both college and life seemed more
complicated than he had thought them. "I am curious to know," he added,
"just whom you consider the cream of the earth. That expression has
stuck in my mind. I don't know why--but it has."

Henley smiled. "Probably because it is such a very badly mixed metaphor.
Well, I consider the college man the cream of the earth."

"What?" four of the men exclaimed, and all of them sat suddenly upright.

"Yes--but let me explain. If I remember rightly, I said that if you were
the cream of the earth, I hoped that God would pity the skimmed milk.
Well, everything taken into consideration, I do think that you are the
cream of the earth; and I have no hope for the skimmed milk. Perhaps it
isn't wise for me to give public expression to my pessimism, but you
ought to be old enough to stand it."

"The average college graduate is a pretty poor specimen, but all in all
he is just about the best we have. Please remember that I am talking in
averages. I know perfectly well that a great many brilliant men do not
come to college and that a great many stupid men do come, but the
colleges get a very fair percentage of the intelligent ones and a
comparatively small percentage of the stupid ones. In other words, to
play with my mixed metaphor a bit, the cream is very thin in places and
the skimmed milk has some very thick clots of cream, but in the end the
cream remains the cream and the milk the milk. Everything taken into
consideration, we get in the colleges the young men with the highest
ideals, the loftiest purpose."

"You want to tell me that those ideals are low and the purpose
materialistic and selfish. I know it, but the average college graduate,
I repeat, has loftier ideals and is less materialistic than the average
man who has not gone to college. I wish that I could believe that the
college gives him those ideals. I can't, however. The colleges draw the
best that society has to offer; therefore, they graduate the best."

"Oh, I don't know," a student interrupted. "How about Edison and Ford
and--"

"And Shakspere and Sophocles," Henley concluded for him. "Edison is an
inventive genius, and Ford is a business genius. Genius hasn't anything
to do with schools. The colleges, however, could have made both Ford and
Edison bigger men, though they couldn't have made them lesser geniuses."

"No, we