Six and two-thirds per cent. interest for one year on the cost of a $15,000,000 battleship would provide a four-year college education for the 1,000 marines on board.
Six per cent. interest for ten hours on the cost of a $15,000,000 battleship would pay the total expenses of a young man or woman while doing the four years’ work for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the great University of Iowa.
One new-type “dreadnought” of the sort now being constructed for the British navy (which is to be practically duplicated by all the other “great powers”)—one of these monsters will cost three times as much as all of the noble buildings of the university of Chicago erected up to june 30, 1905; that is, three times as much as all the beautiful halls constructed during the university’s first thirteen years of unparalleled activity in building.
The total value of all gifts and bequests received by all the higher institutions of learning in the United States in the year ending June 30, 1908, was $14,820,955; that is, $179,000 less than the cost of one first class British battleship.[[44]]
If there are forty-five State Universities in the United States with a total of 6,750 teachers (150 each) receiving an average salary of $2,000, their combined salaries are less than the cost of one “Dreadnought.”
Five per cent. interest on the cost of one “Dreadnought” would pay the combined salaries of 1,500 country school teachers at $500 per year; or, the combined salaries of 750 country preachers at $1,000 per year. (The average salary of a minister in Massachusetts is less than $800.)
One per cent. interest on one “dreadnought” would pay the combined salaries of the presidents of twenty-five of the greatest universities in the united states—at an average salary of $6,000 per year.
It is to be remembered, too, that a battleship is out-classed, out of date and useless within fifteen years after it first glides proudly into the water. But education—the systematic development of the intellectual and social powers and tastes, the ripening of the appetites for the deeper, higher, finer forms of life, charging the soul with knowledge and power for pleasure and achievement—education, which is “to the human soul what sculpture is to a block of marble,”—education, in its glorious influences, is immortal.
Prize-fighter statesmanship sounds loud and is, therefore, great; looks attractive and is, therefore, splendid—in the judgment of the gullible. Prize-fighter statesmanship rests upon the gullibility of ignorance.
Of special importance in this connection is the item of information, furnished in a personal letter to the author of the present volume, by Dr. William T. Harris, who was for many years preceding 1906 our National Commissioner of Education. The information is: That of all the children in the United States more than 76 in every 100 never enter even the first year of the high school or schools of the high-school grade.