Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/169

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point you are going to be able to send your campaigners through the granges with the message that the wealth of the State is not in its soil but in its cultivated men and women. When do you expect to go before your legislators and get them to appropriate a million dollars for a kind of education that cannot be guaranteed to return a penny to the pockets of the tax-payers? When they are ready to do that, we will agree that you are equipped to compete with New England colleges which carry on the great human traditions. Till they are ready to do that, the point of departure for our higher education will remain the terminus of yours. Whatever your secret aspirations toward a genuine intellectual leadership may be, you cannot flee from the destiny of democratic enterprises. The 'beast with many heads' can go only where his feet will carry him—and we know his trough, well enough."

Though these charges against education by the people are serious enough, eastern critics of the State university are not content with pointing out that its character is determined and its functions limited by its financial dependence upon the tax-payers. If this were the only controlling factor, they say, some modest provision for the higher cultivation of the mind might be