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. Nowadays, of course, when the
highest education is deemed necessary to fit a man merely to live,
without any reference to the sort of work he may do, its possession
conveys no such implication."

"After all," I re