TEE COLLEGE-MAN. 353 



eral, prepared through natural force of character to command. They 

 were men from the ranks, active, ambitious, good workmen, strong, 

 proud, yet pleasant in their intercourse with all about them, and per- 

 fectly well prepared for their places by knowledge, experience and 

 natural fitness. 



Why were these skilled mechanics paid the salaries of college presi- 

 dents and of college professors? The answer is simple: They could 

 make themselves so useful and so necessary in the business that the 

 proprietors could make money by employing them, large as was their 

 compensation. Precisely the same principle operates when the presi- 

 dents of great corporations receive tens of thousands of dollars as salary, 

 or fifty thousand or a hundred thousand. The directors of such enter- 

 prises do not give away a hundred thousand dollars simply out of kind- 

 ness; their enormous interests compel them to seek out the one fittest 

 man in all the country, the man who is sought by perhaps many other 

 great enterprises as a guide and director, to make those interests safe; 

 identifying him, him they must have at his own price. Similarly, the 

 great leaders in the industries take a few millions of the many which 

 they earn for the people ; it is quite fair. 



The unlearned and uneducated man will always have his place in 

 this world of ours ; but yet he will not hereafter have such opportunities, 

 however great his natural abilities, as he has had in the past. It is 

 sometimes — not very often — said by 'successful' men of this class that 

 the boy who grows up without learning, and who gives his boyhood's 

 years to unskilled labor in shops and factories and mills, may hope for 

 a larger success than he who is taught sound learning or given a ' liberal 

 and practical' education. They speak without foresight or forethought. 

 The world of the coming generations is to be a very different world 

 from that of these last, even as the last generation lived in a very differ- 

 ent world from that of their fathers. Education is permeating the whole 

 body politic and rapidly becoming distributed to all ranks in life. For 

 one poor man's son in college a generation ago there are many to-day, 

 and for one hundred years ago there are now the many multiplied, 

 and the man who would succeed, in whatever rank of business life, 

 in whatever profession, must hereafter meet in competition men who, 

 in addition to all the native talent which he possesses, and all the 

 energy, vigor and ambition which he may display, will have a brain 

 stored with knowledge and scientifically cultivated and trained, and 

 thus far better equipped than formerly for successful struggles with 

 the world and for seizing the opportunities and meeting the responsi- 

 bilities of the highest positions for which all may strive. 



This is, in fact, admitted, and it is often asserted by the most wise 

 and able and successful of this very class, and Andrew Carnegie is 



VOL. LX. — 23. 



