in the brain. That time is gone, and if William Morris in the flesh could not bring it back, certainly his ghost will not. But if you think for a moment of the difference in mental attitude and mental grasp, it shows up skilled labor for what it is.

I am far from saying that, in this much simpler world which the increasing complication of life is going, paradoxically, to create for some of us, it is a bad thing that children should be "vocationally" trained. (You cannot say "vocationally educated," for that is virtually a contradiction in terms.) Even so, it is only to a very limited degree that our sons can be, in the intervals, their own plumbers or their own carpenters or their own masons, for the unions will never allow it. It is a very minor tinkering that is permitted to the private person. You cannot help to paint your own woodwork in your own house, for the union painter will leave his job if you touch your private paint-brush in his presence. What good, after all, is this famous vocational training, except as you definitely choose to follow through life some one of the trades they teach you? It will not really make the whole man more efficient; for he will not be allowed to use his potential efficiency. It may teach him whether he prefers to be a steamfitter or a bricklayer; but it cannot guarantee him any power to practise either steamfitting or brick

laying, unless he is willing to forsake all else and cling only to that. Never was such nonsense talked by any one as by the new "educators." Labor frankly uses the argument of might and the big stick; but labor, as far as I know, does not pretend that it is something else. It rests its case cynically on our own pampered inability to get on without it.

"Philosophy can bake no bread," replied some philosopher to his critics, “but it can give us God, freedom, and immortality." Those are the last things, I take it, that modern philosophy is really concerned with giving us; but the perversity of one generation need not obscure all history. It is possible for the contemplation of great ideas, of great art, of great poetry, of the epic motions of the human race as revealed in history, to mitigate physical deprivation. It is possible to have plain living and high thinking together-though it is not easy, and never has been, and some of the best-known exponents of that theory have been pitiful failures. Certainly we of the minority must accept for ourselves austerities we were not bred to in our easy-going, materialistic generation. Without taking, like St. Simeon, to the wilful discomfort of a pillar, we must learn to do without a hundred "necessities" that Dante and Shakespeare never dreamed of. We must keep it possible for our children to delight in Dante and Shakespeare; we must not let the

!

authentic intellectual thrill disappear from the world. And, for that, we must insist that the past be not closed to them, and that learning shall not be an unknown good. They will have to do it on bread and milk, not on caviare; but it can be done on bread and milk. That is the point.

I confess that as I look forth in these distressed times on the vast American scene, I find myself pinning my hope to two thingsthe self-consciousness of this minority, and the older Eastern universities. For unless we plan our simplicities cannily, the other people will have won out; and unless the older universities keep up a standard of learning, hold the door open, by main force, to the past, the garnered lore of the world will fail us. We shall progress --but blindly, as the brute creation. The fact is that we are living in an obscurantist epoch. For surely it is obscurantism to deny the legitimacy of any field of knowledge or of virtue, and those folk who would reduce everything to a physical basis are as deadly foes of light as their ancestors who saw in physical experiments nothing but the black art. Every sane person wants science left free to accomplish its marvellous work; but no sane person past early youth would say, as a young woman fresh from her college laboratories said to me a few days since, that chemistry is the root of all knowledge. The Protestants, when they

were on top, were as given to obscurantism, and its accompaniment of persecution, as the Catholics.

In the matter of education, as I have suggested, we shall have to rely on the older colleges of the East. We cannot count on the West to help us, for the West is cursed with state universities. It is by no means my intention or my private inclination to minimize the value of the state universities. The point is that they are uncertain; they are not free; they are dependent, in the last analysis, on public favor, which means public funds, on a kind of initiative and referendum. They may have good luck and become great schools of learning; they may have bad luck and become indifferent and negligible places. They are not really allowed to set their own standards; they must ever be compromising with the personnel of state legislatures. The private colleges and universities of the East at least are not dependent on politics. Their funds are for the most part inadequate, but they do not have to change their curricula to please people who know nothing about what a curriculum should be. As long as their private fortunes last, they can afford to say the thing which they believe to be true. One of the most heartening things that have happened since 1914 is the acquisition of great wealth by Yale University. It means one hopes-that one at least of our

old academic foundations can snap its fingers at ignorance enthroned; that it can send out its thousands endowed with some sense of intellectual values. Intellectual values are not the only ones; but most sane people believe that only by the rigid training of the mind can human beings be taught wise living and moral values. There is no morality by instinct, though there can be morality by inherited inhibitions. There is no social salvation-in the endwithout taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience. These things, because they are not the natural man, are not carelessly come by; they must be deliberately achieved. You will not learn them from the Bolsheviki, or from the I. W. W., or even from Mr. Arthur Henderson. A great deal is said nowadays about practical politics and the rôle of the practical man in building the social structure. Before you can carry out an idea you must have the idea. You cannot get rid of the world of abstract thought. One after the other, leaders of the Church are laying more and more stress on religion's being a strictly social matter. Perhaps it is, though I do not believe it. I should have said that social regeneration was a byproduct of religion, not religion itself. But even the folk who think that Christianity means no slums, and means little else, derive their sanction-or think they do from Christ,