But, you ask, what can education do to alleviate a condition of this sort?  How may the weak influence of the school make itself felt in an environment that has crystallized on every hand this unfortunate standard?  Individualism is in the air.  It is the dominant spirit of the times.  It is reenforced upon every side by the unmistakable evidences of national prosperity.  It is easy to preach the simple life, but who will live it unless he has to?  It is easy to say that man should have social and not individual standards of success and achievement, but what effect will your puerile assertion have upon the situation that confronts us?

Yes; it is easier to be a pessimist than an optimist.  It is far easier to lie back and let things run their course than it is to strike out into midstream and make what must be for the pioneer a fatal effort to stem the current.  But is the situation absolutely hopeless?  If the forces of education can lift the Japanese people from barbarism to enlightenment in two generations; if education can in a single century transform Germany from the weakest to the strongest power on the continent of Europe; if five short years of a certain type of education can change the course of destiny in China;—­are we warranted in our assumption that we hold a weak weapon in this fight against Mammon?

I have intimated that the attitude of my engineer friend toward life is the result of twisted ideals.  A good many young men are going out into life with a similar defect in their education.  They gain their ideals, not from the great wellsprings of human experience as represented in history and literature, in religion and art, but from the environment around them, and consequently they become victims of this superstition from the outset.  As a trainer of teachers, I hold it to be one important part of my duty to fortify my students as strongly as I can against this false standard of which my engineer friend is the victim.  It is just as much a part of my duty to give my students effective and consistent standards of what a good living consists in as it is to give them the technical knowledge and skill that will enable them to make a good living.  If my students who are to become teachers have standards of living and standards of success that are inconsistent with the great ideal of social service for which teaching stands, then I have fallen far short of success in my work.  If they are constantly irritated by the evidences of luxury beyond their means, if this irritation sours their dispositions and checks their spontaneity, their efficiency as teachers is greatly lessened or perhaps entirely negated.  And if my engineer friend places worldly emoluments upon a higher plane than professional efficiency, I dread for the safety of the bridges that he builds.  His education as an engineer should have fortified him against just such a contingency.  It should have left him with the ideal of craftsmanship supreme in his life.  And if his technical education failed to do this, his general education ought, at least, to have given him a bias in the right direction.