All over the States universities spring up like magnificent mushrooms--over-night--and what with the men's universities, the women's colleges, university extension lectures and Chautauqua, not to mention educational schemes of a more modest nature, the United States may be said to be getting educated by electricity.
It takes a stranger in America some time to get accustomed to the mental pace. I shall never forget the German director of a rather famous Art museum there, who came to us in a towering rage and blurted out his indignation. He had been in America only a few months and the sober methods of the Fatherland still clung to him.
"These Americans, O these Americans!" and he tore his long hair. "I haf a letter this morning from a young man, and he ask me--Gott im Himmel, is it conceivable?--he ask me can I--I--I--what you call it?--guarantee--that he can became a portrait painter in three months! It is to grow mad!"
But not only the Fine Arts. A young doctor was explaining to me how thorough and broad his medical education had been (he was from the West), and as impressive and conclusive evidence he added, "I've even taken an extra term on the eye." Now a term is three months.
Alas, it is all owing to the electric age. Why will inventors invent so many time and labour-saving machines? Heaven forgive them! The more intelligent the machine the more machine-like the man who runs it, or is run by it, if the work it leaves him to do is limited and monotonous. Inevitably his outlook on life must become very narrow, and he must lose all ambition, all sense of mental responsibility. Think of spending the days of one's life making eyelet-holes! Many people do.
What good is all this deadly haste to the world? What real good is it doing the labourers and the lower middle-class men, of whom the world mostly consists, if cables and wireless telegraphy make them, so to speak, the next-door neighbours of an estimable yellow man in China? What help to them if they know the daily tragedies of the uttermost corners of the earth the same day rather than never? What use to them the knowledge of how to murder their fellow men scientifically in a war with all the modern improvements? What help to them if a million inventions make their patient hands useless, but provide them with luxuries they cannot afford?