of
its penurious policy in this regard. I should applaud and support every
movement that has for its purpose the raising of teachers' salaries to
the level of those paid in other branches of professional service.
Society should do this for its own benefit and in its own defense, not
as a matter of charity to the men and women who, among all public
servants, should be the last to be accused of feeding gratuitously at
the public crib. I should approve all honest efforts of school men and
school women toward this much-desired end. But whenever men and women
enter schoolcraft because of the material rewards that it offers, the
virtue will have gone out of our calling,--just as the virtue went out
of the Church when, during the Middle Ages, the Church attracted men,
not because of the opportunities that it offered for social service, but
because of the opportunities that it offered for the acquisition of
wealth and temporal power,--just as the virtue has gone out of certain
other once-noble professions that have commercialized their standards
and tarnished their ideals.

This is not to say that one condemns the man who devotes his life to the
accumulation of property. The tremendous strides that our country has
made in material civilization have been conditioned in part by this type
of genius. Creative genius must always compel our admiration and our
respect. It may create a world epic, a matchless symphony of tones or
pigments, a scientific theory of tremendous grasp and limitless scope;
or it may create a vast industrial system, a commercial enterprise of
gigantic proportions, a powerful organization of capital. Genius is
pretty much the same wherever we find it, and everywhere we of the
common clay must recognize its worth.

The grave defect in our American life is not that we are hero
worshipers, but rather that we worship but one type of hero; we
recognize but one type of achievement; we see but one sort of genius.
For two generations our youth have been led to believe that there is
only one ambition that is worth while,--the ambition of property.
Success at any price is the ideal that has been held up before our boys
and girls. And to-day we are reaping the rewards of this distorted and
unjust view of life.

I recently met a man who had lived for some years in the neighborhood of
St. Paul and Minneapolis,--a section that is peopled, as you know, very
largely by Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants. This man