HE highest faculty of mind is the constructive 

 faculty the faculty that builds. 

 A man who builds an industry must be a 

 strong man. The man that builds is not to be 

 feared. He is helping to organize the world for 

 our benefit, and he is keeping our building 

 faculties in practice. The trouble with the old 

 and narrower culture was that it was receptive 

 rather than constructive. 



In the early days of our history, we produced 

 men of a very broad culture a culture that had the quality of 

 constructiveness. Jefferson was such a man. Dr. Benjamin 

 Franklin was such a man. Theirs was, like ours, a building era. 

 Q Men, then, built government rather than industries. But 

 there was a similarity of activity then and now, and a largeness 

 of mind characterized both periods. 



Later, there came a time when the dominant type of the culti- 

 vated man in the United States was a college professor, or a 

 literary man or preacher. Along with them, and after them came 

 the professional scholar, who despised practical life. He had 

 slight knowledge of men. His judgment was not always sound. 

 This we might call our pedantic era. A cultivated man of the 

 pedantic era was not a building man. He acquired learning, 

 and he did little else. Nor was he interesting, and it is hard to 

 call an uninteresting man cultivated. 



The third era is our own time of industrialism. We have the 

 pedant yet; for a man may become a scholar, a specialist, by 

 sheer industry. We make them by machinery, both in our own 

 universities and abroad. But, when we have a cultivated man 

 at all in our industrial era, he is more like the men of our first 

 constructive epoch than he is like the pedant. Industry calls 

 into action the constructive qualities, as statecraft called them 

 into action a century or more ago. 



The cultivated man, in a perfected, democratic industrial life, 

 will be the most widely and sanely cultivated man that has 

 been evolved. 



His chief interest will be in the present; and the great forces 

 of our industrial time will make him saner, broader, better and 

 wiser. 



WALTER H. PAGE. 



