The Pacific Monthly/Volume 14/Number 6/Impressions
IMPRESSIONS
By CHARLES ERSKINE SCOTT WOOD
A Distinct Class of Idle Rick Means a Distinct Set of Legal Privileges Somewhere
Sheepskins
The college year has begun, and at its end the young man will vault over the bars;, and, pointing his diploma at the world, will shout, "Hold up your hands." But, alas, the world will not stand and deliver for a volley of sheepskins. Hamlet says: "Is not parchment made of sheepskins . . . and of calfskins, too? They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that."
So I say they be but sheep and calves who find assurance in a diploma. It is at best but an honorable certificate as to time and course; it cannot of itself impart knowledge. It is not to be conjured with. If the knowledge be not in the brain, the diploma is use- less; and if it be in the mind, the diploma is unnecessary. The struggle to get a diploma by cramming and cribbing is only self-deception. The diploma without the brain-digested knowledge is a mere sheepskin.
The Spanish for "You cannot make a silk purse of a sow's ear" is "Although you dress a monkey in silk, he will still be a monkey. ' '
Although you dress a youth in diplomas, he will still know no more than he knows. But the college life and training are of great value. The college itself is a time-saving, labor-saving device, but it is not a factory of either brains or character. It may develop both, but the germ must be inborn. Few of us realize how little we have to do with the making of ourselves. There is no self-made man. The qualities he has and the will power to develop those qualities are mere inheritances, like the weaknesses of his less fortunate brother, and the lack of will power to resist those weaknesses.
The college life is of as much value, or more, than its studies.
From this reservoir, the college, we may more quickly fill our bottles than if we dug each spring for ourselves; but the size, shape and color of the bottles remain unchanged. The monkey dressed in the silk gown of a college education will still be a monkey.
I am an advocate of college training. It is a luxury none should reject who can have it. It offers ore already dug, and a harvest of friendships; but each man must refine his own ore and win his own friends. The college cannot and does not create one elemental trait. Only the thoughtless and foolish believe a college can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
I know a man who has quite a bundle of learned degrees. He regards them as the mere incidents of his search for what he really wanted to know. And being told a degree was due him from a certain college if he would apply for it, he replied: "What for? I have the knowledge." That is the true light in which to view diplomas, and I hope the rigid diploma will some day give way to the certificate, varying in each case, stating exactly what the holder has done.
The universities have always been the storehouses of learning, and from the Dark Ages till now have been resorted to by those thirsting for knowledge; but, like all established institutions, especially such as are supported by the state or by the wealthy, they have always been conservative, the universities of Russia being only an apparent, not a teal, exception to the rule. Perhaps it is well that they should be conventional as well as conventual, but, valuable as is the college training, he who misses it can take comfort in the thought that diplomas are but sheepskins, and all great original thought has come from outside the university walls.
To prove that mind itself is not created in colleges, we have only to recall such names as Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Newton, Watts, Stephenson, Franklin, Faraday, Edison, Westinghouse, Darwin, Pasteur, Washington, Lincoln, Walt Whitman. The worship of the diploma helps us to respect brainless men who can spell correctly, and to accept fools who know the reign of Queen Anne, or the periods of Homeric poems.
The tendency of our time is to undervalue that most precious thing, individuality. Universities and dictionaries are the enemies to originality. There is a university fashion in thought as well as in dress—and most men never change the costume.
My voice is for the universities as storehouses of valuable knowledge and places o mental training; but as they are admittedly not a necessity in education, so I would like to see them more the home of workers on individual and original lines; and I would like the young man with his diploma to look inside his own head and reflect: Although you dress a monkey in silk, he will still be a monkey.
Good Roads
It is a blind people which fixes its eyes on the railroad and considers it the sum of all tranportation. Only second to it are the wagon roads, and intelligent farming communities ought to appreciate the tremendous yearly loss to the whole community in bad roads. Not only that smaller loads must be hauled, more trips made, more time taken on a trip, and greater wear and tear and breakage. Not only this, but the community with good solid roads the year round will outstrip its rivals in settlement and increased values. The Romans, for military purposes, built through sparsely settled districts roads which endure today, and the ever-accompanying result was the rapid settlement of those districts. The railroad is not the whole thing. Get together, my countrymen, and mend your ways. Be Romans; make your roads everlastingly good.
Oregon Land Frauds
I need not say I have no excuse for any man who, knowing better, has defeated the law and defrauded the people, especially of so valuable and limited a property as land. But I think it has not been enough noticed that the Government itself has encouraged the frauds. I do not refer to collusion with corrupt officials. What I mean is that the rulings of the Department have been such as to encourage the idea of acquiring land by sleeping one night in six months on an alleged homestead. The Department and the Supreme Court of the United States have said that an entryman may borrow the money for his entry, give the land and its use for security, and sell to the mortgagee when the entryman gets his patent, but that he must not contract in advance to do this last. This allows every overt act of fraud, and the rest can be done by a wink or a nod.
Better wipe out all land laws but one,—actual settlement on the land and continuous use; and when that is abandoned with no intention of returning, let the title be gone and the land open to the first comer.
