The steel business is not in Pittsburgh in an industrial museum where the public may gad about on holidays. It is there in the men who earn their living by knowing a little better each year how to make armor-plate.
All this ought to be a matter of course. But there are many who think that science and art can be made to serve us at a cheaper price, that these stern guilds will give up their secret treasures in extension lectures and chautauqua clubs and twenty minutes a week in the public schools. History will show, I think, that this is not true, that no art and no sort of learning was ever vitally present among a people unless it was there as a living occupation.
Learning has come to us in this sense only within the last quarter-century. We were busy at other things before that. Our fathers were doing--as every people must--what they had to do. They had to live, to establish a government, and to maintain their fundamental faiths. They bent themselves to these tasks with the energy of our breed. And the tasks have shaped our national history and character. They gave us the Declaration of Independence and the American farmer who takes for granted that its principles are true. They gave us Chicago, the Amazon who stands yonder with I will written upon her shield and a throng of men who are fit to serve her will. They gave us a Civil War--men who could fight it and afterwards live together in peace. They gave us industry, law, democracy. But not science, not art. These were not wholly absent, but they were guests. They were here in the persons of a few men who in spite of all difficulties did work at them as a life business.
In this far western village, for example, we had two men who brought here the old English classical learning, two who more than fifty years ago had been trained in the universities of Europe, and one whom the radical instinct which set science going in the first place, called from a village academy into membership in the international guild of scholars. What these men did for sound learning and what they did through their pupils to uplift every occupation in the State, it is wholly beyond our power to measure. But one thing they could not do. They could not furnish to society more men who should devote themselves to learning than society would furnish a living for. And the bare fact is that there was a living for very few such men in America in the days before the war. Within the past quarter-century there has been a change in this respect so great that none fails to see it. The millions that we have spent upon universities and high schools, the vast plant of buildings and libraries and laboratories, fill the public eye with amazement. But all this is the husk of what has happened. The real thing is that these millions, this vast plant, these thousands of positions demanding trained men, have brought to life upon this ground the guild of scholars. We do not need any more to exhort men to become scholars. The spirit which was in Thales and Copernicus, in Agassiz and Kirkwood, calls to the Hoosier farmboy in its own voice, and shows him a clear path by which, if he is fit, he may join their great company.
And, if I am not mistaken, Art, which has also been a guest, is ready at last to become a citizen. Why should it not? What is lacking? Yonder are the works of art and the men who know. Here are the youths some share of whom must by right belong to the service of Art. And here are the millions which go to support men in every molehole of scientific research and other millions spent stupidly and wantonly for whatever the shopkeepers tell us is beautiful. We could not create these potential forces that make for art. But if it is true that they are here, we can organize them, as David Starr Jordan and the like of him less than twenty years ago organized the forces that make for science. We can make a path through the school and the university along which all the children of the State may go as far as they will and along which those who are fit may enter the artist's life.
"The mission of society," says Geddes, "is to bring to bloom as many sorts of genius as possible." And this it can do only when each sort of genius has the chance to choose freely its own life occupation.
Here, as I think, is the program for our educational system--to make plain highways from every corner of the State to every occupation which history has proved good.
II
However, as matters actually stand at present, it is your good fortune to have a wide range of occupations among which to choose.
It is no light matter to make the choice. It is to elect your physical and social environment. It is to choose where you will work--in a scholar's cloister, on a farm, or in the cliffs of a city street. It is to choose your comrades and rivals. It is to choose what you will attend to, what you will try for, whom you will follow. In a word, it is to elect for life, for better or worse, some one part of the whole social heritage. These influences will not touch you lightly. They will compass you with subtle compulsions. They will fashion your clothes and looks and carriage, the cunning of your hands, the texture of your speech, and the temper of your will. And if you are wholly willing and wholly fit, they can work upon you this miracle: they can carry you swiftly in the course of your single life to levels of wisdom and skill in one sort, which it has cost the whole history of your guild to win.