Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/65

Rh no benefit to a mind of the first order,—a mind which can co-ordinate. Such a mind can afford to create for its acquirements the widest base, and to wait long before it takes extreme excursions in any single direction. Such a mind can profitably learn much of what the world knows on many diverse subjects before it selects one to be made a life's field of labor. Nowadays we are in danger of making narrow men when we make learned men. Of all men a specialist needs to be a broad man; but how can he be a broad man if he devotes himself to his specialty early in his course of study? The profound scholar is not the one who will laugh at the scheme outlined by John Milton in his Letter to Master Hartlib on Education. Its wonderful breadth is the record of nothing more than what Milton himself did as a youth, in school and college and at Horton; and for all that wonderful breadth of learning which covered all that all languages could then give him, he found use when, comparatively late in life, he entered on the immense political and literary tasks which no man in England but him was trained to accomplish. But, as he reminds Master Hartlib, that is a bow which not every man can draw. That universal breadth of training and that late coming into his kingdom is peculiarly important, not for the drudges, in the second and third rank, but for the master, in the first. The carpenter may begin early to hew to the line; but the architect or the engineer must spend many years over many things before he is master of his profession.

At last, after securing the first rank in college in the days when there were no electives, after a time given to