f it took it all save a bare pittance.
But in truth the expense of educating ten thousand youth is not ten
nor five times that of educating one thousand. The principle which
makes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a
small scale holds as to education also."

"College education was terribly expensive in my day," said I.

"If I have not been misinformed by our historians," Dr. Leete
answered, "it was not college education but college dissipation and
extravagance which cost so highly. The actual expense of your colleges
appears to have been very low, and would have been far lower if their
patronage had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap
as the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers,
receive the same support. We have simply added to the common school
system of compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred
years ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age
of twenty-one and giving him what you used to call the education of a
gentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no
mental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication
table."

"Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of
education," I replied, "we should not have thought we could afford the
loss of time from industrial pursuits. Boys of the poorer classes
usually went to work at sixteen or younger, and knew their trade at
twenty."

"We should not concede you any gain even in material product by that
plan," Dr. Leete replied. "The greater efficiency which education
gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short
period for the time lost in acquiring it."

"We should also have been afraid," said I, "that a high education,
while it adapted men to the professions, would set them against manual
labor of all sorts."

"That was the effect of high education in your day, I have read,"
replied the doctor; "and it was no wonder, for manual labor meant
association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people. There
is no such class now. It was inevitable that such a feeling should
exist then, for the further reason that all men receiving a high
education were understood to be destined for the professions or for
wealthy leisure, and such an education in one neither rich nor
professional was a proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence of
failure, a badge of inferiority rather than superiority. Nowaday