It is true, in out-of-the-way corners and on the lower levels -- and on the higher levels of imperial politics where men have not learned to shrink from shameful devices, the question of children and of the birth-rate is still sometimes debated as a question of the presumptive use of offspring for some ulterior end. And there may still be found those who are touched by the reflection that a child born may become a valuable asset as a support for the parents' old age. Such a pecuniary rating of the parental relation, which values children as a speculative means of gain, may still be met with. But wherever modern civilization has made its way at all effectually, such a provident rating of offspring is not met with in good company. Latterday common sense does not countenance it.
Not that a question of expediency is no longer entertained, touching this matter of children, but it is no longer the patriarchal-barbarian question as to eventual gains that may be expected to accrue to the parent or the family. Except in the view of those statesmen of the barbarian line who see the matter of birth-rate from the higher ground of dynastic politics, a child born is not rated as a means, but as an end. At least conventionally, it is no longer a question of pecuniary gain for the parent but of expediency for the child. No mother asks herself if her child will pay.
Civilized men shrink from anything like rating children as a contrivance for use in the "round-about process of the production of goods." And in much the same spirit, and in the last analysis on much the same grounds, although in a less secure and more loosely speculative fashion, men also look to the higher learning as the ripe fulfilment of material competency, rather than as a means to material success. In their thoughtful intervals, the most businesslike pragmatists will avow such an ideal. But in workday detail, when the question turns concretely on the advisability of the higher education, the workday habit of pecuniary traffic asserts itself, and the matter is then likely to be argued in pecuniary terms. The barbarian animus, habitual to the quest of gain, reverts, and the deliberation turns on the gainfulness of this education, which has in all sobriety been acknowledged the due end of culture and endeavour. So that, in working out the details, this end of living is made a means, and the means is made an end.
No doubt, what chiefly urges men to the pursuit of knowledge is their native bent of curiosity, -- an impulsive proclivity to master the logic of facts; just as the chief incentive to the achievement of children has, no doubt, always been the parental bent. But very much as the boorish element in the present and recent generations will let the pecuniary use of children come in as a large subsidiary ground of decision, and as they have even avowed this to be their chief concern in the matter; so, in a like spirit, men trained to the business system of competitive gain and competitive spending will not be content to find that they can afford the quest of that knowledge which their human propensity incites them to cultivate, but they must back this propensity with a shamefaced apology for education on the plea of its gainfulness.
What is here said of the businesslike spirit of the latterday "educators" is not to be taken as reflecting disparagingly on them or their endeavours. They respond to the call of the times as best they can. That they do so, and that the call of the times is of this character, is a fact of the current drift of things;which one may commend or deprecate according as one has the fortune to fall in with one or the other side of the case; that is to say according to one's habitual bent; but in any event it is to be taken as a fact of the latterday situation, and a factor of some force and permanence in the drift of things academic, for the present and the calculable future. It means a more or less effectual further diversion of interest and support from science and scholarship to the competitive acquisition of wealth, and therefore also to its competitive consumption. Through such a diversion of energy and attention in the schools, the pecuniary animus at large, and pecuniary standards of worth and value, stand to gain, more or less, at the cost of those other virtues that are, by the accepted tradition of modern Christendom, held to be of graver and more enduring import. It means an endeavour to substitute the pursuit of gain and expenditure in place of the pursuit of knowledge, as the focus of interest and the objective end in the modern intellectual life.
