“That’s all right, my dear,” says the oil king, “but every business has to advertise. I figured out that this is the cheapest yet. And, besides, I always wished I’d had an education, so that you and I might get invited out to dinner-parties, and not have everybody laugh at us the way they do.”
This oil king had a pathetic trust in education, as something you could buy ready-made for cash, the same as a political machine or a state railroad commission. If anybody tried to put off on him an oil-field that had got salt water in, he would know the difference; but it did not occur to him that there might be fakes in education, or that a petroleum philanthropist might not be able to order the whole of the human spirit, F. O. B. Chicago, thirty days net.
I picture the educational “he-vamp,” President Harper, calling into consultation some fellow-faker in the architectural line. Says the architectural wizard: “I suppose this old bird will want something plain and economical—the biggest floor-space for his money.”
“Not on your life,” says the educational wizard. “He wants something he never saw before; he’s going in for culture. You know I specialize in these old things—Hebrew and Greek and Assyrian and Sanskrit and Egyptian——”
“How would it do to give him a row of pyramids?” says the architectural wizard.
“No,” says the educational wizard, “he would think that was heathen. He’s a religious old bird—a Baptist, like me; that’s how I got him, in fact—met him at an ice cream festival.”
“Oh, well then, it’s plain,” says the architectural wizard. “What we want is real old Gothic—stained-glass windows, mullioned, and crenellated battlements, and moated draw-bridges—”
“That sounds great!” says the educational wizard. “What does it look like?”
“I’ll have one of my office boys get you up a sketch this afternoon,” says the architectural wizard. “It’s a good style from our point of view, because it uses about four times as much stone per square foot of floor-space, and stone is where we get our rake-off.”
A thousand years ago, you understand, men rode over the earth, clad in heavy iron armor, like hard-shell crabs. Every joint had to be tightly covered, lest a flying arrow should pierce the crack; and when they built themselves homes they were moved by this same terror of swift arrows, so they made the windows narrow and deep. They built the walls of thick stone to withstand the pounding of battering-rams, and to hold up the enormous weight of the pile. Such was the origin of “Gothic” architecture; and I do not know any better way to expose to you the elaborate system of buncombe which is called “higher education” than to state that here in twentieth century America, where we know of bows and arrows only in poetry, and have the materials and the skill to build structures of steel and glass, big and airy and bright as day—we deliberately go and reproduce the architectural monstrosities, the intellectual and spiritual deformities of a thousand years ago, and compel modern chemists and biologists and engineers to do their research work by artificial light, for fear of arrows which ceased to fly when the last Indian was penned up in a reservation.