total population. And who are the chosen few for whom the State supports colleges and technical schools, requiring appropriations amounting to millions? Are they the most capable young men of their generation? Does the State take pains to admit to their lecture rooms only those persons in whose minds the instruction imparted by the professors will surely bring forth fruit? Does it refuse to allow blockheads to usurp the place and opportunities for learning intended for receptive and creative intelligent faculties? No. The State offers these higher branches of learning not to all but to a few, and these few are not chosen for their special intellectual endowments and capacity for assimilating this higher culture, but for their financial conditions. The most dense-headed simpleton can go through college and absorb the mental food spread before him by the professors, without its ever proving of the slightest benefit to the community, if he has money enough to support himself and pay his tuition fees. The most talented young man on the contrary, is excluded from the halls of learning because he lacks these necessary means—a matter of real detriment to the community which may lose by it some Goethe, Kant or Bacon.
Thus the pernicious conditions of society and political economy in our civilization, form a circulus vitiosus from which there is no escape; the laboring man is looked down upon because he has no cultivation; he can not educate himself because education and cultivation cost money, which he has not got. The rich retain for themselves to the exclusion of the poor, not only all the material enjoyments of life, but the intellectual as well. The noblest blessings that civilization has to offer us, culture, poetry and art, are, as a fact, only free to the rich, and cultivation in its most comprehensive sense, is the most important and most exclusive of all their privileges. When
