Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 01.djvu/17

This page has been validated.
INTRODUCTION
v

the Negro. The special phases of education have received attention at the hands of Drs. Thwing and Sills. The former has contributed articles on legal education, coeducation, technical education, and colleges; the latter, articles on medical education and physical education. Professor Irving Fisher has written an illuminating article on Capital. Chancellor Kirkland's contributions include articles on university extension and universities in America. A remarkable series of biographies has been prepared by Dr. Edwin Greenlaw, who also wrote the articles on Bacon, Emerson, Hawthorne, Irving, Milton, Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Whitman, and Whittier. Dr. Henry S. Canby of the Advisory Board has written for the Encyclopædia a brilliant article on the short story. Dr. Councilman has prepared articles on physical education, biology, and eugenics. All the statistical matter has been brought up to the latest possible date, so that, in respect to correspondence to the facts as they are at the present moment, the Encyclopædia can claim to be the most complete work of reference of its sort in existence.

The nature and amount of knowledge with which a man can get through life has varied enormously according to time and circumstances. A South Sea islander, to whom nature supplies food almost without effort on his part and for whom climate makes clothing and shelter almost matters of indifference, needs to trouble little about politics, foreign or domestic, and may be so little curious that he does not miss the results of science. A Lloyd George or a Wilson at the Peace Table, planning for the future of a world, has need of all knowledge. It is not so long since even in our United States there were many whose intellectual appetites and whose needs lay nearer to the former than the latter. But this time has gone by. There is not the remotest farmer on our prairies whose welfare is not involved in the fluctuations of international exchange or in the deliberations of a Reparations Commission. The self-sufficing community becomes rarer and rarer, the purely self-dependent individual has become impossible. In the Western World democracy has given every man a voice in his government, and his government has a voice in the affairs of all other governments. We are all importers and exporters, direct or indirect, and our merely personal affairs force us to look abroad with interest or anxiety. Education is no longer a thing to be forced on the unwilling, because he does not feel the need of it; it is sought for because the common man is perplexed and knows his need to be in-