now why they have
them. Every bird knows how to build its nest. Nature teaches them their
trade. But men must learn their trades in school. I visited a college
once and saw how Greek was taught. They showed me a clay model of
ancient Athens and pointed out the house that each philosopher and poet
lived in thousands of years ago. "Where are the houses," I asked the
graduates, "that you are going to live in to-morrow?" "Heaven only
knows," they said. "We'll have to take our chances in the general
scarcity; our fate is on the knees of the gods." The luck of the
Mooseheart boy is not on the knees of the gods; it is in his own hands.

I visited the Latin department and heard of Rome's ancient grandeur.
"The Romans," they told me, "were not philosophers, but builders.
They built concrete roads to the ends of the earth. But their soldiers
brought back malarial fever from Africa. It destroyed the builders
and their secret perished with them. Eighty years ago concrete was
rediscovered." I asked the students: "Do you know how to make concrete?"
"I'll say we don't," they answered. And that's how much good their Latin
education had done them.

The Mooseheart boys know how to make those concrete roads and how
to build the motor-trucks that travel on them. "Transportation is
civilization." We teach civilization at the Mooseheart school. We
teach art, too. But what is art without civilization? The cave men were
artists and drew pictures on their walls. But you can't eat pictures.
There is a picture on every loaf of bread. You always slice the colored
label off the loaf and eat the bread and throw the art away. The
Russians quit work a few seasons ago, and now they are selling their art
treasures cheap to the roughneck nations that stuck to the pick-ax and
the plow. The moral is: Keep working and you'll get the chromo. This
truth was taught at Mooseheart long before the Russians saw the point
and awarded us their picture gallery.

What I want to emphasize is that we are not opposed to art and
literature. All men want them; need them. We teach how to get them.

CHAPTER XLVI. THE MOOSEHEART IDEA

The majority of the Moose are men in the mechanical trades. But the
primary trade, the one on which all others rest, is agriculture. The
men knew this, and so they founded Mooseheart on the soil. It is an
agricultural school. It occupies more than a thousand acres in the
richest farming region of Illinois. The first thing the students