_ 
PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 35 
I believe, the true corrective of academic excesses, the best 
stay for academic frailties ; and I believe the good understand- 
ing and mutual respect which we may hope to bring about 
between the leaders in the spheres of labour and of learning 
will extend rapidly through the rank and file. 
I hope you will find in what I have so far said, the evidence 
of a desire to acknowledge some of the shortcomings of the 
academic world. But I might well be suspected of having 
had my head turned by the dignity you have conferred upon 
me if I left you under the impression that I thought the 
faults were wholly on one side. In what remains of the time 
at my disposal, I wish to confide in you some of the difficulties 
of the situation which arise from the other side. 
I believe that a very large number of business men go 
wrong, when they enter upon the consideration or criticism 
of educational affairs, by attempting to apply methods and 
standards and principles borrowed from their own callings, 
which, however excellent in their proper place, do not apply 
(or at least do not apply in the same way) to education. 
Let me remind you in the very first place that you can, for 
example, prepare no balance-sheet of a university. You 
know. how much money comes into the university chest and 
how much is paid out; but how much a university costs, 
or how much it earns, no man can discover. Suppose, for 
example, in my zeal to find employment for a student, I send 
you a young chemist, who, by his unrestrained ardour or 
incompetence, misleads you into all kinds of futile extravagance 
—surely you would debit that to the university? I do not 
doubt you would; every care is taken that such things are 
brought home to us! Suppose, on the other hand, that I 
send you some one, like a former student I met last week, 
who, by what he had learned here, increased the output of 
his employer’s business by 33 per cent. Should this not be 
credited to the university—if by some one’s indiscretion you 
