Now if it is not possible to serve equally the needs of both groups, would it not be better to neglect the one tenth of the students, going on to college, even assuming they are the pick of the flock, which they are not always?  They have four more years to correct their mistakes and round out their culture.  If any one must be subordinated, it would be better to neglect them, and focus upon the needs of the nine out of ten, who go directly from the high school into life and have not another chance; yet there are states in the Union, where it is possible for a committee of the state university at the top to say to every high school teacher in the state, “Conform to our requirements, or leave the state, or get out of the profession.”  The threat, moreover, has been carried out more than once.

That situation is utterly wrong.  We want organization of the educational system, with each unit cooperating with the next higher, but if education is to solve the problem of democracy and furnish moral leadership for American life, we want each unit to be free, first of all, to serve its own constituency to the best of its power.  The problem is not serious for the big city high school, with its multiplied elective courses, but for the small rural or town high school, with its limited corps of teachers and its necessarily fixed courses, the burden is onerous indeed.

Is the American college and university doing all that it might do in cultivating moral leadership for American democracy?  The last decades have seen an astounding and unparalleled development of higher education in America.  In the old days, the college was usually on a denominational foundation.  It was supported by the dollars and pennies of earnest religionists who believed that education was necessary to religion and morality.  The president was generally a clergyman of the denomination; he taught the ethics course, and all students were required to take it.  There was compulsory chapel attendance, and once a day the entire student body gathered together to listen to some moral and religious thought.

Then came the immense expansion of higher education.  Courses were multiplied and diversified.  Universities were established or endowed by the state.  Academies became colleges, and colleges, universities.  Institutions were generally secularized.  Compulsory chapel attendance was rightly abandoned.  Each department served its own interest apart.  Until to-day certain of our great universities are not unlike vast intellectual department stores, with each professor calling his goods across the counter, and the president, a sort of superior floorwalker, to see that no one clerk gets too many customers.  It is an impressive illustration of what has happened to our higher institutions that, in certain of them, the one regular meeting place of the entire student body in a common interest, is the bleachers by the athletic field.  One continues to believe in college athletics, in spite of the frequent