training, the enrichment of the mind. You make the same mistake in a less
degree, when you bend to the popular ignorance and conceit so far as to
direct your college education to sordid ends. The certain end of yielding
to this so-called practical spirit was expressed by a member of a
Northern State legislature who said, "We don't want colleges, we want
workshops." It was expressed in another way by a representative of the
lower house in Washington who said, "The average ignorance of the country
has a right to be represented here." It is not for me to say whether it
is represented there. Naturally, I say, we ought by the time of middle
life to come to a conception of what sort of things are of most value. By
analogy, in the continual growth of the Republic, we ought to have a
perception of what we have accomplished and acquired, and some clear view
of our tendencies. We take justifiable pride in the glittering figures of
our extension of territory, our numerical growth, in the increase of
wealth, and in our rise to the potential position of almost the first
nation in the world. A more pertinent inquiry is, what sort of people
have we become? What are we intellectually and morally? For after all the
man is the thing, the production of the right sort of men and women is
all that gives a nation value. When I read of the establishment of a
great industrial centre in which twenty thousand people are employed in
the increase of the amount of steel in the world, before I decide whether
it would be a good thing for the Republic to create another industrial
city of the same sort, I want to know what sort of people the twenty
thousand are, how they live, what their morals are, what intellectual
life they have, what their enjoyment of life is, what they talk about and
think about, and what chance they have of getting into any higher life.
It does not seem to me a sufficient gain in this situation that we are
immensely increasing the amount of steel in the world, or that twenty
more people are enabled on account of this to indulge in an unexampled,
unintellectual luxury. We want more steel, no doubt, but haven't we wit
enough to get that and at the same time to increase among the producers
of it the number of men and women whose horizons are extended, who are
companionable, intelligent beings, adding something to the intellectual
and moral force upon which the real progress of the Republic depends?

There is no place where I would ch