Chapter IX (3)

What gives to these movements that I have been discussing the character which I have been ascribing to them is not so much the specific things which they severally aim to accomplish, but the spirit in which they are carried on, and perhaps still more the spirit, or want of spirit, with which they are met. It is not that a balance is falsely struck between the benefit of the concrete, circumscribed, measurable improvement aimed at and the injury done to some deeper, more pervading, and quite immeasurable element or principle of life; it is that the balance is not struck at all. The subtler, the less tangible, element is simply ignored. It was not always so. It was not so in the last generation, or the generation before that. The phenomenon is one that is closely bound up with the ruling tendency of thought and action in all directions; it is not an accident of this or that particular agitation. Perhaps in no direction is it more convincingly manifested than in the prevailing tone of opinion, or at least of publicly expressed opinion, in regard to the objects and ideals of universities. That in the present state of the world's economic and social development on the one hand, and of the various sciences on the other, "service"--that is, service directly conducive to the general good--should be regarded as one of the great objects of universities, is altogether right; that it should be spoken of as their _only_ object, which is the ruling fashion, is most deplorable. The object of a university, said Mill, is to keep philosophy alive; yet it would go hard with the present generation to point to any one more truly and profoundly devoted to the service, the uplifting, of the masses of mankind than was John Stuart Mill. Were he living he would recognize, as thoroughly as the best efficiency man of them all, that the universities of today have opportunities and duties which were undreamed of half a century ago. But he would know, too, that in those activities which are directed to the promotion of practical efficiency, the university is but one of many agencies, and that if it were not doing the work some other means would be found for supplying the demand. Its paramount value he would find now, as he did then, in the service it renders not to the ordinary needs of the community but to the higher intellectual interests and strivings of mankind. That so few of us have the courage clearly to assert a position even distantly approaching this--such a position as was mere matter of course among university men in the last generation--is perhaps the most significant of all the indications of our drift toward Flatland.

THE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF PROPERTY