Diversities of American Life | Page 4

trotting horse has been reduced from two
minutes forty seconds to two minutes eight and a quarter seconds.
During the past fifteen years a universal and wholesome pastime of
boys has been developed into a great national industry, thoroughly

organized and almost altogether relegated to professional hands, no
longer the exercise of the million but a spectacle for the million, and a
game which rivals the Stock Exchange as a means of winning money
on the difference of opinion as to the skill of contending operators.
The newspapers of the country--pretty accurate and sad indicators of
the popular taste--devote more daily columns in a week's time to
chronicling the news about base-ball than to any other topic that
interests the American mind, and the most skillful player, the pitcher,
often college bred, whose entire prowess is devoted to not doing what
he seems to be doing, and who has become the hero of the American
girl as the Olympian wrestler was of the Greek maiden and as the
matador is of the Spanish senorita, receives a larger salary for a few
hours' exertion each week than any college president is paid for a year's
intellectual toil. Such has been the progress in the interest in education
during this period that the larger bulk of the news, and that most looked
for, printed about the colleges and universities, is that relating to the
training, the prospects and achievements of the boat crews and the
teams of base-ball and foot-ball, and the victory of any crew or team is
a better means of attracting students to its college, a better
advertisement, than success in any scholastic contest. A few years ago a
tournament was organized in the North between several colleges for
competition in oratory and scholarship; it had a couple of contests and
then died of inanition and want of public interest.
During the period I am speaking of there has been an enormous
advance in technical education, resulting in the establishment of
splendid special schools, essential to the development of our national
resources; a growth of the popular idea that education should be
practical,--that is, such an education as can be immediately applied to
earning a living and acquiring wealth speedily,--and an increasing
extension of the elective system in colleges,--based almost solely on
the notion, having in view, of course, the practical education, that the
inclinations of a young man of eighteen are a better guide as to what is
best for his mental development and equipment for life than all the
experience of his predecessors.
In this period, which you will note is more distinguished by the desire
for the accumulation of money than far the general production of
wealth, the standard of a fortune has shifted from a fair competence to

that of millions of money, so that he is no longer rich who has a
hundred thousand dollars, but he only who possesses property valued at
many millions, and the men most widely known the country through,
most talked about, whose doings and sayings are most chronicled in the
journals, whose example is most attractive and stimulating to the minds
of youth, are not the scholars, the scientists, the men of, letters, not
even the orators and statesmen, but those who, by any means, have
amassed enormous fortunes. We judge the future of a generation by its
ideals.
Regarding education from the point of view of its equipment of a man
to make money, and enjoy the luxury which money can command, it
must be more and more practical, that is, it must be adapted not even to
the higher aim of increasing the general wealth of the world, by
increasing production and diminishing waste both of labor and capital,
but to the lower aim of getting personal possession of it; so that a
striking social feature of the period is that one-half--that is hardly an
overestimate-- one-half of the activity in America of which we speak
with so much enthusiasm, is not directed to the production of wealth, to
increasing its volume, but to getting the money of other people away
from them. In barbarous ages this object was accomplished by violence;
it is now attained by skill and adroitness. We still punish those who
gain property by violence; those who get it by smartness and cleverness,
we try to imitate, and sometimes we reward them with public office.
It appears, therefore, that speed,-the ability to move rapidly from place
to place,--a disproportionate reward of physical over intellectual
science, an intense desire to be rich, which is strong enough to compel
even education to grind in the mill of the Philistines, and an inordinate
elevation in public consideration of rich men simply because they are
rich, are characteristics of this little point of time on which we stand.