WHY To STUDY 23 



(1) Capacity 



(2) Opportunity, and 



(3) Application 



are essential to make a master of anyone in anything. 



It takes considerable time to show the fruits of any study, and men 

 are impatient tor results. 



Someone has truly said that the value of education consists in 

 knowing a man when you meet one, which means, of course, that any- 

 one knowing- his subject-matter in a given case will be able to know 

 whether anyone claiming to be an expert in that field speaks truth- 

 fully or not. It means that we must KNOW about a matter ourselves 

 or we cannot intelligently choose worthy leaders. It means, we must 

 be able to distinguish the gold from the dross, real ability from adver- 

 tising, real scientific men from those who are simply well-known. It 

 means we must be able to distinguish between the real expert and him 

 who calls himself one, remembering that experts do not disagree very 

 much, but those w r ho call themselves experts do. 



Whether we like it or not, we must acknowledge that every man 

 who has ever lived and exercised any kind of leadership, good or bad, 

 has left his impress upon our generation, for all those who have gone 

 on before us and now sleep the eternal sleep, together with those living 

 now, as well as those who are to come after us, really form a great 

 intellectual democracy, from which all but the present generation are 

 removed only in person. The past is with us in an overwhelming mass. 

 The unborn are those for whom we now labor. All of our customs, our 

 traditions, our ideas of conventional correctness and wrongness, and our 

 laws were given us by men long since passed away. In other words, 

 we are actually ruled by dead men. 



The men who have long since passed away have given us their 

 ideas and their thoughts but, to us those ideas and thoughts, those laws 

 and traditions must be interpreted and our interpreters of these things 

 are our courts. Mr. Taft has said, "I care not who makes the laws, if 

 I can but interpret them." It is always meanings, interpretations, that 

 are of most value. Now, we know that our judges (our legal interpre- 

 ters), are practically all college men, which means that, in the final 

 analysis, everyone of us is controlled by what our institutions of higher 

 learning teach. 



It therefore behooves each and everyone of us to obtain the requisite 

 knowledge before forming an opinion as to whom we shall follow as 

 leaders in every walk of life, whether this be in politics or in war, in 

 civil or religious life, in law or in medicine, in farming or commercial 

 pursuits, or we shall be wrong in nearly every thing we do. 



Not possessed of knowledge, a man confuses sincerity with truth, 

 forgetting that the most insane of men are intensely sincere, and that 

 anyone following sincere but insane theories of life must quite naturally 



