Extracts from Addresses 353
but not needed at the front, because the fighting has ceased, let that
young boy, whose education has been interrupted—and that is a great
tragedy to these young men, to wake up and find that they have lost
those very precious years from eighteen to twenty-two—let them go
to the universities of the Allies. Let those who speak Italian go to
the Italian universities, for there is quite a lot to learn there. Let
those that can follow a lecture in French go to the French universities,
and let all of them come to our universities. We have got the doors wide
open to do the best we can for them, and even if they only come for
a term, or for two terms or for three terms, we shall do everything we
can to make them feel at home, everything we can to help them on their
way to a better education. I think that is a really practical step. It
may be possible to do that through your war office,—and I am pestering
them a good deal,—or we might do it individually. Let those boys come
over and see what sort of people we are.
Now, one is always apt to sit down and think of one’s troubles, and
one of my troubles has been, Why was I selected to come over here on
this mission? Obviously some forty million other people were equally
capable of coming over, and when I reflected on that I thought probably
that our government wished to pay some sort of a tribute to the ad-
ministrative ability of Mr. Hoover, Mr. Peden, and the self-abnega-
tion of the great American people in refusing food that we might feed.
I think our government wanted to send somebody as a physical evidence
that we are not starving.
You are business men and you must appreciate the value that educa-
tion gives to a business career. Education is not merely a knowledge of
facts. It trains a man’s mind so that he has the power to take the
initiative. He has a grip on a subject. He has the power of taking
responsibility. It gives him a vision, and there is no man in the world
who needs a vision so much as a business man. He wants to foresee, and
education does give one that foresight. It is, as Arthur Benson, who, I
gather, as an author is read a good deal over here, tells us, next to our
death and our birth the most important influence on our life. To those
two I should myself add marriage, but I am a bachelor, and Mr. Ben-
son is a bachelor, so you must not take this as an expert opinion. But at
any rate he places us educators in the same rank as the gentleman who
introduces us into life, and the gentleman who generally sees us out of
it, and thus places us in the same category as the doctor, the divine, the
physician, and, one might almost add, the undertaker.
Now, you are not paying your educators enough. It is a world-wide
cry. Those who are training the youth are underpaid, and you cannot
expect the best work from men who are always having to think about