and liberally by the modern business world.
Thus, those who control capital, or administer capitalized enterprises,
cannot afford any longer to be without a knowledge of the history and
significance of the labor movement. We should not have had the
desperate struggle between anthracite coal corporations and the miners
in Pennsylvania, a year or so ago, if there had been a full
understanding on the part of the capitalists of the honorable and
valuable nature of trade agreements, and particularly of the history of
the relations of capital and labor in the bituminous coal districts of
the United States. I am speaking now from the standpoint of the
business man. There is much to be said, doubtless, in respect to the
shortcomings and the sometimes fatuous and even suicidal methods of the
labor organizations. But for the modern business man who cares to take
his place influentially in commerce, in social life, and as a man among
men in his city or his commonwealth, it is no longer justifiable to be
unfamiliar with the labor question in its economics and its history.

Herein lies one great service that the university can perform (and our
best colleges and universities are today performing it with marked
intelligence and ability), the service, namely, of providing very
liberal courses for young men who expect to go into business, in the
general science of economics, in the history of modern economic
progress, in the development of the wage system, in the history and
methods of organized labor, and in very much else that helps to place
the life of a practical man of business affairs upon a broad and
liberal basis. In the early days of our history it was the especial
function of the college to train young men for the ministry. In a
somewhat later period it was notably true of institutions like Yale and
Princeton that their training seemed to fit many men for the law and
for statecraft. We had, you see, passed from that theocratic phase of
colonial New England life to the political constructive period of our
young republic.

But we have been passing on until we have emerged in a great and
transcendent period of commercial expansion and scientific discovery
and application. It is a hopeful sign, therefore, that our universities
are finding out and admitting the demand that present-day conditions
impose, and are training many men in the pursuit of modern science,
while they are training many others in the understanding of the
app