rial as the possibility of his acquiring flexibility under
pressure, for it would seem to be almost mathematically demonstrable
that he will, in the near future, be subjected to a pressure under which
he must develop flexibility or be eliminated.

There can be no doubt that the modern environment is changing faster
than any environment ever previously changed; therefore, the social
centre of gravity constantly tends to shift more rapidly; and therefore,
modern civilization has unprecedented need of the administrative or
generalizing mind. But, as the mass and momentum of modern society is
prodigious, it will require a correspondingly prodigious energy to carry
it safely from an unstable to a stable equilibrium. The essential is to
generate the energy which brings success; and the more the mind dwells
upon the peculiarities of the modern capitalistic class, the more doubts
obtrude themselves touching their ability to make the effort, even at
present, and still more so to make it in the future as the magnitude of
the social organism grows. One source of capitalistic weakness comes
from a lack of proper instruments wherewith to work, even supposing the
will of capital to be good; and this lack of administrative ability is
somewhat due to the capitalistic attitude toward education. In the
United States capital has long owned the leading universities by right
of purchase, as it has owned the highways, the currency, and the press,
and capital has used the universities, in a general way, to develop
capitalistic ideas. This, however, is of no great moment. What is of
moment is that capital has commercialized education. Apparently modern
society, if it is to cohere, must have a high order of generalizing
mind,--a mind which can grasp a multitude of complex relations,--but
this is a mind which can, at best, only be produced in small quantity
and at high cost. Capital has preferred the specialized mind and that
not of the highest quality, since it has found it profitable to set
quantity before quality to the limit which the market will endure.
Capitalists have never insisted upon raising an educational standard
save in science and mechanics, and the relative overstimulation of the
scientific mind has now become an actual menace to order because of the
inferiority of the administrative intelligence.

Yet, even supposing the synthetic mind of the highest power to be
increasing in proportion to the population, instead of, as I suspec