Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/54

 practical. It didn't prepare me for life. It was no good. I have no use for it."

To this complaint, it should be remarked in passing, there is a retort which all "liberal" educators should learn to make. It runs something like this: "You say that your education is 'no good.' We reply, O solid businesslike character, that your life is 'no good.' Your life is not good because you built it too small to hold the best of your possessions. The trouble with you is that you wasted the wealth that we gave you; you let it rust and mildew in cellar and attic. You lacked ingenuity to use your capital. You have not learned how to employ your culture in your life. You have made no outlets for your education. Don't blame us if you can't draw Niagara through a brass faucet into the kitchen sink. As occasion serves, we shall continue to 'pump' culture into you. Perhaps bye and bye you will burst. We rather hope that you will. Then possibly something more exhilarating than a solid businesslike character can be made of the ruins and fragments of you. Perhaps a personality can be made of the pieces. At any rate there will be no great loss if you burst. On the whole, go ahead and burst. You really aren't worth saving."

But now let us assume the more enlivening of the possibilities: let us assume that a miracle happens. As Brown looks dismally out from the barred small window of his character upon his life, and sees that it is finished, suddenly his past breaks away from him, as Sicily broke away from Italy,