Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/240

226 with the anvil and last, sit around an esthetic five o'clock tea table and discourse as learnedly as some young lawyer or clerk in chancery. For honest labor is honorable and dignified, whether it is applied to making overcoats or planning the construction of railroads, and their mental culture being equal, the civil engineer has no more claims to respect and consideration than the tailor. But the college graduate does nothing to bring about such a condition of affairs. He prefers to starve in his shabby-genteel overcoat rather than to live in comparative plenty, wearing a leather apron. This is the cause of one of the most threatening phases of the social problem: the over-supply of men in the liberal professions.

The college graduate thinks himself of too much account to descend into and be lost in the lowest class of society, by voluntarily assuming the trade of a manual-laborer, and according to the ideas prevalent in society he is correct. He demands of the world that he be supported as a master, not support himself, like a slave. But the world has only a limited demand for the kind of work which the college-bred man considers suitable for him. Hence, in the older civilized countries, at least one half of the graduates are condemned to spend their lives in hoping and envying, obtaining none of life's blessings, fighting hard for the small amount of daily bread they require, and often going hungry, standing beside the overloaded, groaning table of the upper ten thousand, while suffering the pangs of semi-starvation. Certain friends of humanity, of that stamp who consider wars and pestilences as blessings for the human race, because they leave more room and better conditions of existence for those remaining alive, these people express their convictions that cultivation is an injury to mankind, that the increase in the number of intermediate and high schools,