s, 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
dullness 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 inconveniences 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 which we depend. If, indeed, we could not afford to
educate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by
nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we could
give. The naturally refined and intellectual can better dispense with
aids to culture than those less fortunate in natural endowments.

"To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not
consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population
of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women, as
was the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied,
merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous
crowd? Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a
palatial apartment, if the windows on all four sides open