Page:Traveler from Altruria, Howells, 1894.djvu/207

Rh better not gone to college at all. They said he would be none the better for it, and would always be miserable when he looked back to it."

The manufacturer did not reply, and the professor, after a preliminary hemming, held his peace. It was the banker who took the word. "Well, so far as business is concerned, they were right. It is no use to pretend that there is any relation between business and the higher education. There is no business man who will pretend that there is not often an actual incompatibility, if he is honest. I know that when we get together at a commercial or financial dinner, we talk as if great merchants and great financiers were beneficent geniuses, who evoked the prosperity of mankind by their schemes from the conditions that would otherwise have remained barren. Well, very likely they are, but we must all confess that they do not know it at the time. What they are consciously looking out for then is the main chance. If general prosperity follows, all well and good; they are willing to be given the credit for it. But, as I said, with business as business, the 'education of a gentleman' has nothing to do. That education is always putting the old Ciceronian question: whether the fellow arriving