remains their only consolation.

The last weak runnings of the war spirit will be "punitive
expeditions." A country that turns its arms only against uncivilized
foes is, I think, wrongly taunted as degenerate. Of course it has
ceased to be heroic in the old grand style. But I verily believe that
this is because it now sees something better. It has a conscience. It
will still perpetrate peccadillos. But it is afraid, afraid in the
good sense, to engage in absolute crimes against civilization.

[1] Published in the Official Report of the Universal Peace Congress,
held in Boston in 1904, and in the _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1904.

XIII

THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED[1]

Of what use is a college training? We who have had it seldom hear the
question raised; we might be a little nonplussed to answer it offhand.
A certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest
reply which I myself can give: The best claim that a college education
can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to
accomplish for you, is this: that it should _help you to know a good
man when you see him_. This is as true of women's as of men's
colleges; but that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction I
shall now endeavor to show.

What talk do we commonly hear about the contrast between college
education and the education which business or technical or professional
schools confer? The college education is called higher because it is
supposed to be so general and so disinterested. At the "schools" you
get a relatively narrow practical skill, you are told, whereas the
"colleges" give you the more liberal culture, the broader outlook, the
historical perspective, the philosophic atmosphere, or something which
phrases of that sort try to express. You are made into an efficient
instrument for doing a definite thing, you hear, at the schools; but,
apart from that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum,
incapable of spreading light. The universities and colleges, on the
other hand, although they may leave you less efficient for this or that
practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more
important than skill. They redeem you, make you well-bred; they make
"good company" of you mentally. If they find you with a naturally
boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a technical
school may leave you. This, at least, is pretended; this is what we