when ticketed and labeled and forced on us by others, this indeed should
be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.

The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line,
as boring subways is the engineer's line and the surgeon's is
appendicitis. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish
for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a
disgust for cheap-jacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference
of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs
about us. Expertness in this might well atone for some of our
awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ignorance of dynamos. The best
claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase in
which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what I
said: it should enable us to _know a good man when we see him_.

That the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows from the fact
that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like
ours should have its sons and daughters skillful, you see that it is
this line more than any other. "The people in their wisdom"--this is the
kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its trial, and
no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about us are
pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but are no
longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its critics now
affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So it
was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world without end.
Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior
from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny; and
the picture papers of the European continent are already drawing Uncle
Sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. The
privileged aristocracies of the foretime, with all their iniquities, did