Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/239

Rh some young man of the lower classes succeeds in mastering the higher branches of education by means of almost superhuman exertions, by deprivations and humiliations, begging if need be, and receives a diploma in the university, he never returns to the position of his father. Free from the prejudices and ideas of society, which consider a man who obtains his livelihood by manual labor as a being of the lowest social status, he could take up the trade of his father and show the world one example of a day-laborer standing upon the same scale of culture as the ink-flourishing public functionary and the recluse professor. But he does not do this, he strengthens these prejudices by enrolling himself as a member of the privileged class, by affecting to look upon manual labor as degrading, and by getting his support, like the other members of the upper classes, from the laboring people. There are many kinds of manual labor by which a skilled mechanic or artisan, can earn without extra effort, a good living while preserving his independence; on the other hand, nine tenths of the situations in the business houses, railroads, and in the civil service, only pay very limited salaries. And yet the college graduate prefers one of the latter positions by far, even with its accompanying office slavery, to the better income with liberty. As a government employé he belongs to the privileged class in society, to the exclusive brotherhood of cultured Philistinism, but as a working-man, he would stand outside of the castes with whom society affiliates, and be looked upon as a barbarian who did not breath the same mental atmosphere as the cultivated set. These circumstances would all be changed if the college graduate would take his place at the lathe and the man with the leather apron be reading Horace at his nooning, and the blacksmith or shoemaker, with their diplomas in their pockets, after the day's work is finished