CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT

USES OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS

[Address by Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University since 1869 (born in Boston, March 20, 1834; -), delivered at the annual meeting of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, November 18, 1890. Dr. Eliot was introduced by the President of the Chamber, Charles S. Smith, as a modest gentleman, who has most successfully devoted his life-work to the task of molding the thought and forming the character of young men to whom we must soon bequeath the reins of power."]

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MR. PRESIDENT and GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER of COMMERCE-Before we can talk together to advantage about the value of education in business, we ought to come to a common understanding about the sort of education we mean and the sort of business. Nobody doubts that primary and grammar-school training are useful to everybody; or that high-school training is advantageous for a clerk, salesman, commercial traveler, or skilled workman; or that technical or scientific school training is useful to an engineer, chemist, electrician, mechanician, or miner. Our question is, of what use is the education called "liberal" to a man of business? The education called liberal has undergone a great expansion during our generation, and is now, in the best institutions, thoroughly conformed to modern uses. All universities worthy of the name-even the oldest and most conservative-now supply a broad and free range of studies, which includes the ancient subjects, but establishes on a perfect equality with them the new and vaster subjects of modern languages and literature, history, political science, and natural science.

We must not think of the liberal education of to-day as dealing with a dead past-with dead languages, buried peoples, and exploded philosophies; on the contrary, everything which universities now teach is quick with life and capable of application to modern uses. They teach indeed the languages and literature of Judea, Greece, and Rome; but it is because those literatures are instinct with eternal life. They teach mathematics, but it is mathematics mostly created within the lifetime of the older men here present. In teaching English, French, and German, they are teaching the modern vehicles of all learningjust what Latin was in medieval times. As to history, political science, and natural science, the subjects themselves, and all the methods by which they are taught, may properly be said to be new within a century. Liberal education is not to be justly regarded as something dry, withered, and effete; it is as full of sap as the cedars of Leb

anon.

And what sort of business do we mean? Surely the larger sorts of legitimate and honorable business; that business which is of advantage both to buyer and seller, and to producer, distributor, and consumer alike, whether individuals or nations, which makes common some useful thing which has been rare, or makes accessible to the masses good things which have been within reach only of the few-I wish I could say simply, which make. dear things cheap; but recent political connotations of the word cheap [laughter] forbid. We mean that great art of production and exchange which through the centuries has increased human comfort, cherished peace, fostered the fine arts, developed the pregnant principle of associated action, and promoted both public security and public liberty.

With this understanding of what we mean by education on the one hand and business on the other, let us see if there can be any doubt as to the nature of the relations between them. The business man in large affairs requires keen observation, a quick mental grasp of new subjects, and a wide range of knowledge. Whence come these powers and attainments—either to the educated or to the uneducated-save through practice and study? But education is only early systematic practice and study under

guidance. The object of all good education is to develop just these powers-accuracy in observation, quickness and certainty in seizing upon the main points of a new subject, and discrimination in separating the trivial from the important in great masses of facts. This is what liberal education does for the physician, the lawyer, the minister, and the scientist. This is what it can do also for the man of business; to give a mental power is one of the main ends of the higher education. Is not active business a field in which mental power finds full play? Again, education imparts knowledge, and who has greater need to know economics, history, and natural science than the man of large business?

Further, liberal education develops a sense of right, duty, and honor; and more and more, in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor, as well as on good judgment. [Applause.] Education does this through the contemplation and study of the moral ideals of our race; not in drowsiness or dreaminess or in mere vague enjoyment of poetic and religious abstractions, but in the resolute purpose to apply spiritual ideals to actual life. The true university fosters ideals, but always to urge that they be put in practice in the real world. When the universities hold up before their youth the great Semitic ideals which were embodied in the Decalogue, they mean that those ideals should be applied in politics. When they teach their young men that Asiatic ideal of unknown antiquity, the Golden Rule, they mean that their disciples shall apply it to business; when they inculcate that comprehensive maxim of Christian ethics, "Ye are all members of one another," they mean that this moral principle is applicable to all human relations, whether between individuals, families, states, or nations. [Aplause.]

Now, there is no field of human activity in which ideals applied are of more value than in business. Again, higher education has always made great account of the power of expression in speech and writing, whence has arisen an opinion that liberal education must be less useful to the man of business than to the lawyer, or minister, because the business man has less need than they of this power. It seems to me that this view is no longer true. Have we

not all seen, in recent years, that leading men of business, particularly those who act for corporations, have great need of a highly trained power of clear and convincing expression? Business men seem to me to need, in speech and writing, all the Roman terseness and the French clearness; the graces and elegancies of literary style they may indeed dispense with, but not with the greater qualities of compactness, accuracy, and vigor. It is a liberal education indeed which teaches a youth of fair parts and reasonable industry to speak and write his native language strongly, accurately, and persuasively. That one attainment is sufficient reward for the whole long course of twelve years spent in liberal study. [Applause.]

But you may say: This is all theory; what are the facts with regard to the connection between higher education and successful business life? To investigate the results actually obtained in this respect by the American colleges during the past forty or fifty years would require the cooperation of a very large number of persons; for no satisfactory result could be reached which was not based on an intimate knowledge of the careers and personal fortunes of thousands of men who are in no sense public men. Business life does not necessarily bring a man before the public as the life of a lawyer, minister, or politician does; each individual can only report the facts which have fallen under his personal observation. My own class in Harvard College numbered eighty-nine at graduation. Eleven of that number, or one-eighth of the whole, have attained remarkable success in business-a larger proportion than have distinguished themselves to a corresponding degree in any other walk of life. [Applause.]

Among the young men who have graduated from Harvard University within forty years, I have seen many cases of rapid advancement from the bottom to the top of business corporations in great variety. A young man leaves college at twenty-three and goes into a cotton mill at the bottom; and in four years he is superintendent. Another lands in a Western city, three days after his graduation, without a dollar, and without a friend in the city, and ten years afterwards he is the owner of the best establishment for printing books in that city. A young

man six years out of college is superintendent of one of the largest woolen mills in the United States. Another, but a little older, is the manager of one of the most important steel works in the country.

These are but striking examples of a large class of facts. In eastern Massachusetts graduates of Harvard get greatly more than their due numerical proportion of the best places in banking, insurance, transportation, and manufacturing. This is the case not only in the old, wellestablished occupations, but in the new as well. For example, the president of the corporation which controls one of the newest industries in the world is a Harvard first scholar. I speak from no little personal observation when I say that there is no more striking general fact about the graduates of Harvard during the past fifty years than their eminent success in business. From one-fifth to one-third of the members of the successive graduating classes ultimately go into business. The same is probably true of many another American college.

Finally, successful business men themselves give no doubtful answer to the question we are considering. I observe that successful business men, with the rarest exceptions, wish their sons to be educated to the highest point the sons can reach. No matter whether the father be himself an educated man or not; when his success in business has given him the means of educating his children he is sure to desire that they receive a liberal education whether they are going into business or not.

I should not worthily represent here the profession to which I belong if I did not say in closing that liberal education is an end in itself, apart from all its utilities and applications. When we teach a child to read, our primary aim is not to enable it to decipher a way-bill or a receipt, but to kindle its imagination, enlarge its vision, and open for it the avenues of knowledge. The same is true of liberal education in its utmost reach. Its chief objects for the individual are development, inspiration, and exaltation; the practical advantages which flow from it are incidental, not paramount.

For the community the institutions of higher education do a like service. They bring each successive generation