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Coffee And Repartee
by
“Mr. Pedagog,” returned the landlady, severely, “is one of the gentlemen who always have their receipts for the past six months.”
“Which betrays a very saving disposition,” accorded the Idiot. “I wish I had all I’d received for six months. I’d be a rich man.”
“Would you, now?” queried the Bibliomaniac. “That is interesting enough. How men’s ideas differ on the subject of wealth! Here is the Idiot would consider himself rich with $150 in his pocket–“
“Do you think he gets as much as that?” put in the School-master, viciously. “Five dollars a week is rather high pay for one of his–“
“Very high indeed,” agreed the Idiot. “I wish I got that much. I might be able to hire a two-legged encyclopaedia to tell me everything, and have over $4.75 a week left to spend on opera, dress, and the poor but honest board Mrs. Smithers provides, if my salary was up to the $5 mark; but the trouble is men do not make the fabulous fortunes nowadays with the ease with which you, Mr. Pedagog, made yours. There are, no doubt, more and greater opportunities to-day than there were in the olden time, but there are also more men trying to take advantage of them. Labor in the business world is badly watered. The colleges are turning out more men in a week nowadays than the whole country turned out in a year forty years ago, and the quality is so poor that there has been a general reduction of wages all along the line. Where does the struggler for existence come in when he has to compete with the college-bred youth who, for fear of not getting employment anywhere, is willing to work for nothing? People are not willing to pay for what they can get for nothing.”
“I am glad to hear from your lips so complete an admission,” said the School-master, “that education is downing ignorance.”
“I am glad to know of your gladness,” returned the Idiot. “I didn’t quite say that education was downing ignorance. I plead guilty to the charge of holding the belief that unskilled omniscience interferes very materially with skilled sciolism in skilled sciolism’s efforts to make a living.”
“Then you admit your own superficiality?” asked the School-master, somewhat surprised by the Idiot’s command of syllables.
“I admit that I do not know it all,” returned the Idiot. “I prefer to go through life feeling that there is yet something for me to learn. It seems to me far better to admit this voluntarily than to have it forced home upon me by circumstances, as happened in the case of a college graduate I know, who speculated on Wall Street, and lost the hundred dollars that were subsequently put to a good use by the uneducated me.”
“From which you deduce that ignorance is better than education?” queried the School-master, scornfully.
“For an omniscient,” returned the Idiot, “you are singularly near-sighted. I have made no such deduction. I arrive at the conclusion, however, that in the chase for the gilded shekel the education of experience is better than the coddling of Alma Mater. In the satisfaction–the personal satisfaction–one derives from a liberal education, I admit that the sons of Alma Mater are the better off. I never could hope to be so self-satisfied, for instance, as you are.”
“No,” observed the School-master, “you cannot raise grapes on a thistle farm. Any unbiassed observer looking around this table,” he added, “and noting Mr. Whitechoker, a graduate of Yale; the Bibliomaniac, a son of dear old Harvard; the Doctor, an honor man of Williams; our legal friend here, a graduate of Columbia–to say nothing of myself, who was graduated with honors at Amherst–any unbiassed observer seeing these, I say, and then seeing you, wouldn’t take very long to make up his mind as to whether a man is better off or not for having had a collegiate training.”
“There I must again dispute your assertion,” returned the Idiot. “The unbiassed person of whom you speak would say, ‘Here is this gray-haired Amherst man, this book-loving Cambridge boy of fifty-seven years of age, the reverend graduate of Yale, class of ’55, and the other two learned gentlemen of forty-nine summers each, and this poor ignoramus of an Idiot, whose only virtue is his modesty, all in the same box.’ And then he would ask himself, ‘In what way have these sons of Amherst, Yale, Harvard, and so forth, the better of the unassuming Idiot?'”