IS THIS A DEGENERATE AGE? 485 



favored classes of a century ago. The vastly increased number of 

 students in our colleges and high schools is but the natural outcome of 

 this intellectual growth. 



Unfortunately, this condition gives room for apprehension; the 

 increase in number of students is said to be so far out of proportion to 

 the population that there is danger of over-education; the professions 

 will be overcrowded with ill-paid workers, who might have gained a 

 comfortable living in other callings. This foreboding is not new; it 

 was old a century ago and was as true then as it is now. Many good 

 men, mistaking their vocation, have gone into professions, though fitted 

 by nature to be only hewers of wood and drawers of water, while others 

 have wasted their lives in professional work, who would have been 

 successful as merchants. There is no danger that the condition will 

 be worse because of increased facility for acquiring an education. 



If higher education were merely preparation for service in the so- 

 called learned professions of law, medicine and theology, there might 

 be room for anxiety. But higher education has no longer an aim so 

 narrow as that — it is not to meet the needs of the few, it is to fit the 

 many for life's work. Fifty years ago, college life certainly tended to 

 unfit men for the sterner realities of life, for the whole course of training 

 was as far removed as possible from relation to the ordinary conditions ; 

 but not so to-day. For the most part, college professors are no longer 

 recluses; they are expected to take part in social movements; even in 

 politics; many of them, especially of those on the scientific side, are 

 interested in vast business enterprises, partly because they gain greater 

 opportunity for investigation and partly because, as investigators, they 

 need incomes greater than the meager salaries paid by colleges. Train- 

 ing by such men is very different from that by closet students. 



All this is conceded, but only that one may make more strongly the 

 assertion that everything looks to the practical, that real culture is 

 neglected, that we are living on the literature of an earlier generation, 

 for nothing new is produced. The difficulty lies in the vagueness of 

 the terms 'culture' and 'literature.' The writer has made diligent 

 search among college men for a clean-cut definition of 'culture.' The 

 results are not wholly satisfactory. Among professors, there is a tend- 

 ency to regard cultiire as that mental condition attained through 

 close application to the studies embraced within the definer's depart- 

 ment; some in professional life appear to think that it is a something 

 acquired only by close application to such studies as have no practical 

 application; they are inclined to deny the title of culture study to 

 modei'n languages; had they lived a century and a half ago, doubtless 

 they would have denied that title to the ancient languages, which at 

 that time were studied solely with a view to use; a great majority of 

 the older college graduates maintain that it is that peculiar mental 



