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 



