354 Extracts from Addresses
cents and quarters. It is an old cry. In the time of Plato, “The
cheapest thing going to-day,” said the Satirist, “is education. I pay
my cook four pounds a year, but a philosopher can be had for sixpence
and a tutor for four cents.” Go down some eighteen hundred years,
and you will find Erasmus saying the same thing. “So to-day,” says
Erasmus, “a man stands aghast at paying for his boy’s education a
sum which would buy a fowl or hire a farm hand. Frugality is another
name for madness.” Well, that madness still exists, and I want any
of you who have any influence to follow in the footsteps of the Governor
of this great State, for he told us yesterday he was trying to get ade-
quate appropriations to aid the state educational institutions of Texas.
Try to see that these men are better paid. In my country at any rate an
education is a necessary evil. It is a bit of a nuisance. It is like trying
on clothes, or having your hair cut, or being photographed—a thing to
be got through with as much patience as you can, but not a thing to give
much attention to, an irksome kind of thing.
Two appeals I want to make. One is, do what you can to send your
boys over to us, and get our boys and young women to come over here,
and secondly, do help a little bit more to help the teachers of your chil-
dren. The future rests with them. I am not particularly interested in
organs, and public libraries generally seem to be able to get on fairly
well, but I think that the part of that vast fortune that Mr. Carnegie
has spent, which in my opinion is the best spent part, is the part that
he gave to pensioning professors of this country and Canada. I think
that is one practical method that is a very real and a very substantial
contribution to education. A man who is receiving only two thousand
or twenty-four hundred a year, with a family, must be worrying about
the future. Mr. Carnegie took that worry away from him, and he can
now, if he wants to, sit down and think of his troubles and fall asleep.
You must remember that these men are very hard worked, that it is
a tremendously trying task that they have. It is a task which takes it
out of one, doing the same thing, dealing with the same more or less
unwilling boys. Last night at a reception I had the opportunity of talk-
ing to a little boy, who told me all about his summer vacations, his
school, and what he was learning. He was learning arithmetic and
French grammar and some history, and I asked him which he hates
most, and he said: “Oh, the teacher.” I want you to love the teacher.
Those men after all are spending their lives in dropping buckets into
empty wells and growing tired in drawing nothing up.
Sir Henry Miers: It is a great privilege to me to be present on an
occasion like this, and it is a great privilege for myself and my colleagues