r the shopkeepers tell us
is beautiful. We could not create these potential forces that make for art.
But if it is true that they are here, we can organize them, as David Starr
Jordan and the like of him less than twenty years ago organized the forces
that make for science. We can make a path through the school and the
university along which all the children of the State may go as far as they
will and along which those who are fit may enter the artist's life.

"The mission of society," says Geddes, "is to bring to bloom as many sorts
of genius as possible." And this it can do only when each sort of genius
has the chance to choose freely its own life occupation.

Here, as I think, is the program for our educational system--to make plain
highways from every corner of the State to every occupation which history
has proved good.

II

However, as matters actually stand at present, it is your good fortune to
have a wide range of occupations among which to choose.

It is no light matter to make the choice. It is to elect your physical and
social environment. It is to choose where you will work--in a scholar's
cloister, on a farm, or in the cliffs of a city street. It is to choose
your comrades and rivals. It is to choose what you will attend to, what you
will try for, whom you will follow. In a word, it is to elect for life, for
better or worse, some one part of the whole social heritage. These
influences will not touch you lightly. They will compass you with subtle
compulsions. They will fashion your clothes and looks and carriage, the
cunning of your hands, the texture of your speech, and the temper of your
will. And if you are wholly willing and wholly fit, they can work upon you
this miracle: they can carry you swiftly in the course of your single life
to levels of wisdom and skill in one sort, which it has cost the whole
history of your guild to win.

But there is, of course, no magic in merely choosing an occupation. If you
do nothing to an occupation but choose it, it can do nothing at all to you.
If you are an incorrigible lover of holidays, so that the arrival of a
working-day makes you sick, if every task thrust into your hands grows
intolerable, if every calling, as soon as you have touched its drudgery,
grows hateful--that is to have the soul of a tramp. It is to be stricken
with incurable poverty. You turn your back upon every company of men where
anything worth while is to be done. You shut out of yourself