the sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line, as boring subways is the engineers line and the surgeons is appendicitis. our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. we ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us. expertness in this might well atone for some of our ignorance of dynamos. the best claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase in which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is then, exactly what i said: it should enable us to know a good man when we see him.
that the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows, from the fact that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like ours should have its sons and daughters skilful, you see that it is this line more than any other. the people in their wisdom鈥攖his is the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. fickleness and violence used to be, but are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. what its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. so it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world without end. vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny; and picture-papers of european continent are already drawing uncle sam with hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. the privileged aristocracies of the foretime, with all their iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human quality and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring traditions. but when democracy is sovereign, its doubters say, nobility will form a sort of invisible church, and sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and favor, will have to vegetate on sufferance in private corners. they will have no general influence. they will be harmless eccentricities.
now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of democracy? nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly rotted鈥攁nd democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. but, on the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croakers picture. the best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty. our better men shall show the way and we shall follow them; so we are brought round again to the mission of the higher education in helping us to know the better kind of man whenever we see him.