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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/255

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A STUDY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY SUCCESS.
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cent, had, however, completed the college course, and this in my opinion is enough to invalidate the arguments of C. P. Huntington and others against such training for business men. We have no means of knowing just how many of our business men throughout the country have taken the college course, but computed roughly, one man in about 300 of all grades and stations in life has been so educated. Since this includes mill operatives and other classes in which such training is practically unknown, we must assume that the ratio would be much larger for the business man. Yet it seems to me that even a most generous estimate could not bring it up to one in eight—that of our business men of eminence—and we should be forced to conclude that the college course has even for him, remote as the connection seems to be, been a contributor to his success. This argument would also apply to the financier, who comes next with his 18 per cent, of college graduates. Our statesmen, the next class, and the congressmen, who differ but little, are hardly to be congratulated on their showing. Thus one may say that with our whole male citizenship eligible to those positions of honor—the boast of our republic—whose ratio of college training is one to 300, while that for the eminent man of these two classes is about one to five as shown by our figure, the probability of gaining such honorable mention is increased about sixty-fold for these our law-makers and diplomats by the college course, an increase which is not to be despised by those who aim at these high places at popular disposal. This too for college conditions in which departments of finance and special facilities for diplomatic training have not played so important a part as they are likely to in the future. Although artists and musicians seem to be uneducated classes we must not neglect the fact shown by the figure that large numbers (43 per cent, and 33 per cent, respectively) were educated abroad, where undoubtedly they were spending their time to better advantage than could have been done in any college at home. Next after the sailor and the soldier, whose heavy black lines upon the figure bear testimony to the efficiency of our national academies for the training of officers on land and sea, comes, in our descending scale of learnedness, the lawyer. His educational showing, when compared with that of the sister professions of medicine and theology, is not a favorable one. With 40 per cent, of the shining lights of our legal fraternity innocent either of professional training or of academic instruction beyond the high school, we wonder what the education of the lesser lights may be and whether really much education is essential to success. The records of the bar examination in the various states are so kept, or rather so not kept, as to make it impossible to ascertain the previous training of those admitted, so I am unable to show these facts for the rank and file of the profession. The reports of the TJ. S. Commissioner of Education, however, show that for the last twenty years 27 per cent.