wonderful
equipment. Today we are replacing the many small colleges with a few
great centralized state normal schools and state universities. We are
spending millions upon them in laboratories, equipment and maintenance.
Today we scour the earth for specialists to sit in the chairs and speak
the last word in every department of human research.

O, how the students of the "dark ages" would have rejoiced to see this
day! Many of them never saw a germ!

But each student has the same definite effort to make in assimilation
today as then. Knowing and growing demand the same personal struggle in
the cushions of the "frat" house as back on the old oak-slab bench with
its splintered side up.

I am anxiously awaiting the results. I am hoping that the boys and
girls who come out in case-lots from these huge school plants will not
be rows of lithographed cans on the shelves of life. I am hoping they
will not be shorn of their individuality, but will have it stimulated
and unfettered. I am anxious that they be not veneered but inspired,
not denatured but discovered.

All this school machinery is only machinery. Back of it must be
men--great men. I am anxious that the modern school have the modern
equipment demanded to serve the present age. But I am more anxious that
each student come in vital touch with great men. We get life from life,
not from laboratories, and we have life more abundantly as our lives
touch greater lives.

A school is vastly more than machinery, methods, microscopes and
millions.

Many a small school struggling to live thinks that all it needs is
endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the
spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when
the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty
degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in
the financial prosperity that has engulfed them.

Can we keep men before millions, and keep our ideals untainted by
foundations? That is the question the age is asking.

You and I are very much interested in the answer.

Chapter VII

The Salvation of a "Sucker"

The Fiddle and the Tuning

HOW long it takes to learn things! I think I was thirty-four years
learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I have
not yet learned it. Every few days I stumble over it somewhere.

For that sentence utters one of the fundamentals of life that underlies
every field of activity