No doubt it is quite natural that Americans should infer, from the immense and growing attendance at American universities and colleges, that nowhere on earth are educational prospects so bright as they are in this country. Have we not 780 colleges, with 265,564 students in them? What more could he asked But it appears not only that Dr. Abraham Flexner, secretary of the General Education Board, asks a good deal more but that, in his view, Americans do not value education, and that conditions favorable to scholarship do not prevail in this country. That is to say, we have the schools, but they do not realize their potentialities. And one reason, Dr. Flexner says, is that we do not pay successful educators salaries that will enable them to live decently. In this country, a man or woman is paid what he can get--what his talents wil fctch in the market. If he has something attractive to sell, and also has the knack of putting himself forward, of advertising himself, he san get a great deal. If he has merely merit, but cannot make people want him, he gets very little. And the good scholar, the cogent thinker, is often a very poor advertiser.

The result of an educational system conducted on this basis, with the school valued on account of the number of students that it can attract, or the advertising value of the stamp that its name can put on the graduate, is fatal to real scholarship. It misses the mark of culture altogether--so that one may say that the more scholars the country has the less scholarship it has to show. The essential fault of our national attitude toward education is our disposition to regard it as a commodity like any other, to be regulated by the law of supply and demand. In this materialistic view lies the secret of the fact hat with infinitely less expenditure, fewer facilities and few or seekers, real scholarship on the part of the average college graduates probably reached a higher level when Emerson, Holmes, Lowell and Felton were coming out of the modest institutions of an earlier day than it does now. Boston Transcript.