When we are born we find an educational system here; we do not devise it, it was established by a generation long since dead.  When we are ready to attend school we find a schoolhouse already built; we do not build it, it was erected by the taxpayers, many of whom are dead.  When we are ready for instruction we find teachers prepared by others, many of whom have passed to their reward.

How do we feel when we complete our education?  Do we count the cost to others and think of the sacrifices they have made for our benefit?  Do we estimate the strength that education has brought to us and feel that we should put that strength under heavier loads?  We are raised by our study to an intellectual eminence from which we can secure a clearer view of the future; do we feel that we should be like watchmen upon the tower and warn those less fortunate of the dangers that they do not yet discern?  We should, but do we?  I venture to assert that more than nine out of ten of those who receive into their lives, and profit by, the gift of education are as ungrateful as the nine lepers of whom the Bible tells us—­they receive, they enjoy, but they give no thanks.

But it is even worse than this; the Bible does not say that any one of the nine lepers used for the injury of his fellows the strength that Christ gave back to him.  All that is said is that they were ungrateful; but how about those who go out from our colleges and universities?  Are not many of these worse than ungrateful?  I would not venture to use my own language here; I will quote what others have said.

Wendell Phillips was one of the learned men of Massachusetts and a great orator.  In his address on the “Scholar in a Republic,” he said that “The people make history while the scholars only write it.”  And then he added, “part truly and part as coloured by their prejudices.”

Woodrow Wilson, while president of Princeton University, said: 

“The great voice of America does not come from seats of learning.  It comes in a murmur from the hills and woods, and the farms and factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us from the homes of common men.  Do these murmurs echo in the corridors of our universities?  I have not heard them.”

President Roosevelt, while in the White House, presented an even stronger indictment against some of the scholars.  In a speech delivered to law students at Harvard he declared that there was scarcely a great conspiracy against the public welfare that did not have Harvard brains behind it.  He need not have gone to Harvard to utter this terrific indictment against college graduates; he might have gone to Yale, or Columbia, or Princeton, or to any other great university, or even to smaller colleges.  It would not take long to correct the abuses of which the people complain but for the fact that back of every abuse are the hired brains of scholars who turn against society and use for society’s harm the very strength that society has bestowed upon them.