A SCIENCE OF COMMERCE 5 



"lower": in the sense, for instance, in which "higher" mathe- 

 matics is related to elementary. It cannot mean simply a 

 continuation or carrying-further of the same studies. A boy 

 whose parents can afford to delay his entrance into business 

 life to the age of twenty or twenty-one, after three years at a 

 university, is obviously expected to occupy a different sort of 

 place from the boy who enters the office at seventeen. He is 

 expected ultimately to become an officer in the industrial and 

 commercial army. To put it quite frankly, the boys for whom 

 commercial education of a university type primarily caters are 

 the sons and kinsfolk of people who can give them better 

 openings into business life than most clerks can possibly enjoy. 

 The only students without any such backing that, in justice to 

 the fellows themselves, a university dare attract, are boys of 

 more than usual ability. For such boys, indeed, their pro- 

 fessors, if they keep in touch with manufacturing and commercial 

 circles, will usually have no great difficulty in finding suitable 

 openings. And though men with a college training, if they 

 prove to have no aptitude for affairs, may remain all their lives 

 in very subordinate positions unless they have family wealth 

 at their back ; and, on the other hand, boys educated simply to 

 be efficient clerks frequently rise to positions of power : yet the 

 training of the one class must differ in its whole tone and 

 spirit from that suitable for the other. Training of the highest 

 kind must aim before everything at guiding and strengthening 

 the powers of judgment And evidently this is possible in a 

 different sense with young men of from seventeen or eighteen 

 to twenty or twenty-one, from what it is with boys of from 

 fourteen to seventeen. 



Some subjects will at once occur to most people as suitable 

 constituents of a university commercial course. Foremost 

 among them will probably be modern foreign languages. 

 Some academic authorities will demur. The value of modern 

 languages, they say, is " instrumental " only. They are tools 

 which will be found useful, just as arithmetic will be ; but a 

 faculty of commerce ought to assume, so they assert, in the one 

 case as in the other, that students will acquire these tools for 

 themselves, and need not exact an acquaintance with them for 

 its degrees. But the parallel with arithmetic is very incomplete. 

 We can assume that boys will bring with them to the university 

 sufficient arithmetical knowledge ; we can enforce the require- 



