cessaries of life, while at the same time affording
abundant opportunity for the study of the language and literature of our
own race, the blending thus of cultural and practical training should
possess a clientage immeasurably larger, because more useful, than where
only the purely cultural is sought. Where the head is educated away from
the hand and the number fitted for ministerial and professional duties
far overruns the demand for service, a heavy burden is imposed upon the
producing masses. At the same time thousands are graduated every year
for positions that have only a prospective existence. The professions
are overcrowded to a degree that challenges the sanity of the country's
educational energies. And were it not for the gravity of the theme, the
strenuous defense that is set up for the system and the efforts put
forth every day to still further augment the number of neophytes for
professional honors, it would seem ridiculous.

But why this overcrowding? Because the atmosphere of the professional
institution fills the student with prejudice against physical labor. It
is menial. His education has fitted him for something nobler than to
toil in the field or in the work-shop. Institutional rivalry also does
its share, sending out alluring advertisements and thus filling the
college classes with recruits from the farms and from the homes of labor
with candidates for positions in life of greater respectability than
their parents were able to enjoy. The seeds of prejudice against rural
life and manual labor are often scattered in the country schools by
teachers innocently imbued with the "ideal condition." The fascinations
and allurements of the city readily impress themselves upon the youthful
mind, and the fact that facilities for liberal education were not
offered for the relief of the toiling millions, unless to transform them
into a different social element, naturally turned the eyes of those who
were able to obtain a liberal education toward the cities.

It remained for the federal government to attempt to turn the tide that
was setting too strongly toward urban life. The government's remedy is
not prohibitive legislation, but what should have been afforded without
direct government interference--a liberal education with a direct
bearing upon agriculture and the mechanic arts for those who naturally
desire to fit themselves for such pursuits; to place the farmer and the
artisan upon an intellectual and social