"I see." Hugh didn't altogether see. Both college and life seemed more complicated than he had thought them. "I am curious to know," he added, "just whom you consider the cream of the earth. That expression has stuck in my mind. I don't know why—but it has."
Henley smiled. "Probably because it is such a very badly mixed metaphor. Well, I consider the college man the cream of the earth."
"What?" four of the men exclaimed, and all of them sat suddenly upright.
"Yes—but let me explain. If I remember rightly, I said that if you were the cream of the earth, I hoped that God would pity the skimmed milk. Well, everything taken into consideration, I do think that you are the cream of the earth; and I have no hope for the skimmed milk. Perhaps it isn't wise for me to give public expression to my pessimism, but you ought to be old enough to stand it."
"The average college graduate is a pretty poor specimen, but all in all he is just about the best we have. Please remember that I am talking in averages. I know perfectly well that a great many brilliant men do not come to college and that a great many stupid men do come, but the colleges get a very fair percentage of the intelligent ones and a comparatively small percentage of the stupid ones. In other words, to play with my mixed metaphor a bit, the cream is very thin in places and the skimmed milk has some very thick clots of cream, but in the end the cream remains the cream and the milk the milk. Everything taken into consideration, we get in the colleges the young men with the highest ideals, the loftiest purpose."
"You want to tell me that those ideals are low and the purpose materialistic and selfish. I know it, but the average college graduate, I repeat, has loftier ideals and is less materialistic than the average man who has not gone to college. I wish that I could believe that the college gives him those ideals. I can't, however. The colleges draw the best that society has to offer; therefore, they graduate the best."
"Oh, I don't know," a student interrupted. "How about Edison and Ford and—"
"And Shakspere and Sophocles," Henley concluded for him. "Edison is an inventive genius, and Ford is a business genius. Genius hasn't anything to do with schools. The colleges, however, could have made both Ford and Edison bigger men, though they couldn't have made them lesser geniuses."
"No, we must not take the exceptional man as a standard; we've got to talk about the average. The hand of the Potter shook badly when he made man. It was at best a careless job. But He made some better than others, some a little less weak, a little more intelligent. All in all, those are the men that come to college. The colleges ought to do a thousand times more for those men than they do do; but, after all, they do something for them, and I am optimistic enough to believe that the time will come when they will do more."
"Some day, perhaps," he concluded very seriously, "our administrative officers will be true educators; some day perhaps our faculties will be wise men really fitted to teach; some day perhaps our students will be really students, eager to learn, honest searchers after beauty and truth. That day will be the millennium. I look for the undergraduates to lead us to it."