Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/361

Rh, prepared through natural force of character to command. They were men from the ranks, active, ambitious, good workmen, strong, proud, yet pleasant in their intercourse with all about them, and perfectly well prepared for their places by knowledge, experience and natural fitness.

Why were these skilled mechanics paid the salaries of college presidents and of college professors? The answer is simple: They could make themselves so useful and so necessary in the business that the proprietors could make money by employing them, large as was their compensation. Precisely the same principle operates when the presidents of great corporations receive tens of thousands of dollars as salary, or fifty thousand or a hundred thousand. The directors of such enterprises do not give away a hundred thousand dollars simply out of kindness; their enormous interests compel them to seek out the one fittest man in all the country, the man who is sought by perhaps many other great enterprises as a guide and director, to make those interests safe; identifying him, him they must have at his own price. Similarly, the great leaders in the industries take a few millions of the many which they earn for the people; it is quite fair.

The unlearned and uneducated man will always have his place in this world of ours; but yet he will not hereafter have such opportunities, however great his natural abilities, as he has had in the past. It is sometimes—not very often—said by 'successful' men of this class that the boy who grows up without learning, and who gives his boyhood's years to unskilled labor in shops and factories and mills, may hope for a larger success than he who is taught sound learning or given a 'liberal and practical' education. They speak without foresight or forethought. The world of the coming generations is to be a very different world from that of these last, even as the last generation lived in a very different world from that of their fathers. Education is permeating the whole body politic and rapidly becoming distributed to all ranks in life. For one poor man's son in college a generation ago there are many to-day, and for one hundred years ago there are now the many multiplied, and the man who would succeed, in whatever rank of business life, in whatever profession, must hereafter meet in competition men who, in addition to all the native talent which he possesses, and all the energy, vigor and ambition which he may display, will have a brain stored with knowledge and scientifically cultivated and trained, and thus far better equipped than formerly for successful struggles with the world and for seizing the opportunities and meeting the responsibilities of the highest positions for which all may strive.

This is, in fact, admitted, and it is often asserted by the most wise and able and successful of this very class, and Andrew Carnegie is