Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/440

436 complicated by the establishment of commercial courses in high schools. The high school has the advantage in that it can formulate a systematic course of study covering the special training desired, and can couple with it a fairly adequate general secondary education. By having a larger scholar population and holding it for a series of years the high school is able, furthermore, to carry out in its commercial course a more ambitious program of study than the 'commercial college' with its floating population, and so it can group and systematize its work to the best advantage. It remains, however, to be seen what relation the public high school and the private school will eventually sustain to one another in this branch of education.

Higher Commercial Education is the effort of universities to respond to the call for a course of education which shall fit young men for the more responsible positions in industry. It aims to provide the theoretical and systematic part of the education of those who are to determine and execute the commercial and financial policy of businesses. It has more particularly in view at present persons who will occupy such positions as managers of departments, foreign agents and buyers of large concerns, officials of banks, insurance and transportation companies, merchants, journalists, government employees at home or abroad, as members of the consular and diplomatic service, etc.

There are three chief reasons why higher commercial education has become an imperative demand of the times and why the great universities of this country as of other countries are responding to the call made upon them by public opinion. These are briefly, that business has become an intellectual pursuit, that in business a sufficient training is not found for the adequate performance of its own tasks, and finally, that in the juncture thus created the universities are being actuated by a new, broad and constructive policy to take hold of the problem.

To consider these separately, the first reason is that the higher tasks and the more responsible positions of industry now involve an intellectual pursuit making profound demands upon the intelligence of those who undertake them. As Mr. Arthur Balfour, the first lord of the English treasury, has recently said, "In the marvelously complicated phenomena of modern trade, commerce, production and manufacture there is ample scope for the most scientific minds and the most critical intellects; and if commerce is to be treated from the higher and wider viewpoint it must be approached in the broader spirit of impartial scientific investigation."

The economic system in vogue before the industrial revolution hardly gave an opportunity for much of a science of productive industry or for systematic courses of study preparatory to the task of guiding industrial forces. That revolution enlarged the individual business unit through the use of machinery in connection with great sources of power, and of labor through an elaborate differentiation of tasks, the