We have simply added to the common school system of compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred years ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one and giving him what you used to call the education of a gentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication table." "Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of education," I replied, "we should not have thought we could afford the loss of time from industrial pursuits.

Boys of the poorer classes usually went to work at sixteen or younger, and knew their trade at twenty." "We should not concede you any gain even in material product by that plan," Dr.Leete replied.

"The greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it." "We should also have been afraid," said I, "that a high education, while it adapted men to the professions, would set them against manual labor of all sorts." "That was the effect of high education in your day, I have read," replied the doctor; "and it was no wonder, for manual labor meant association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people.

There is no such class now.

It was inevitable that such a feeling should exist then, for the further reason that all men receiving a high education were understood to be destined for the professions or for wealthy leisure, and such an education in one neither rich nor professional was a proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence of failure, a badge of inferiority rather than superiority.