Why Study 23 



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

 are impatient for 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 field will be able to know 

 whether one claiming to be an expert in that field speaks truthfully or 

 not. It means that we must know about a matter ourselves or we can- 

 not intelligently choose worthy leaders. It means, we must be able to 

 distinguish gold from dross, real ability from advertising, scientific men 

 from those who are simply well known. It means that 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 who 

 call themselves experts do. 



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

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

 left his impress upon our generation. All those who have gone on 

 before us, 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 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, which 

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

 preters), 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 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 everything 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 

 reap destruction ; forgetting that to obtain the truth in anything, all the 

 facts must be known and a valid interpretation placed upon the facts, 

 and this can only be done by considering man in his entirety — in his 

 physical, mental, and ethical aspects. 



One must, therefore, weight life's dice with knowledge if correct- 

 ness is to be formed in any walk of life, 



