“It is true that there is an increasing, and just now, an unusual demand for college-bred men in all walks of life. The prescribed preliminaries to legal and medical education are, step by step, approaching graduation from college, and have reached it, in some instances, while these professional courses themselves have been extended and deepened, till they are now nearly or quite on a par with the old liberal training with which they are co-ordinated in the modern university. As to engineers,—fifteen years ago, the manufacturers of machinery had to be coaxed to take those pioneers, the Cornell men, into their shops and give them a chance. But where one went, many followed. Last spring, when the class of 1900 came to graduation, every student in this branch was eagerly bid for two or three times over. One great electrical firm alone asked to be given the entire class. There is observable, too, a gradual increase in the call for college-bred teachers in the public schools, and this demand will grow by what it feeds upon.
“All this is but the sign and symbol of an increasing complexity and organization in our civilization. Rough-and-ready methods are going out, and the untrained handy-man with them. In all directions, as expanding American manufactures and commerce come into competition with those of Europe, it is daily more obvious that the higher skill and intelligence, making the closest use of its resources, will win. Nowadays, to do the work of the world as the world will have it done, and will pay for having it done, requires that a man be trained to the exactitude of scientific methods, and that he be given the wide mental outlook and the special training which he can acquire in the university, and nowhere else.”
XXIII
A “Jack of All Trades” Masters One and Becomes the Poet of the People.
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY and I were at breakfast together, and the appearance of his cup of steaming coffee, into which he hastened to drop four full-sized blocks of sugar, threw the “Hoosier” poet into a train of reflections, for which he presently found expression. “They don’t make coffee any more,” he observed, in an almost aggrieved tone. “It is a lost art. You don’t see any more the clear, transparent beverage that mother used to make. It’s thick and murky, and, worse than all, it does no good to protest.”
It was a fortunate circumstance, however, this recalling a youthful remembrance, for it led him at once into a lively discussion of that part of his career,—his early struggles,—which possess for the average person, and often for the subject himself, far more interest and fascination than any later triumphs, no matter how complete. It is doubtful if there is in the literary world, to-day, a personage whose boyhood and young manhood can approach in romance and unusual circumstances that of the author of “The Old Swimmin’ Hole.” It was almost as if it were all a chapter from a fairy tale, to see the poet sitting there, calm and dignified, and to listen to his slow speech, in well-modulated voice, and still attempt to realize of what circumstances he had been a factor, what experience he had passed through. All tradition was against his accomplishing anything in the world. How, indeed, said the good folks of the little town of Greenfield, Indiana, could anything be expected of a boy who cared nothing for school, and deserted it at the first opportunity, to take up a wandering life.
It is a wonder of wonders that from such a beginning should spring a poet whose ideals are among the noblest in American literature. “Ike Walton’s Prayer,” it would seem, must have been spoken from the poet’s heart.
IKE WALTON’S PRAYER.
I crave, dear Lord,