POST EDUCATIONAL

A steadily growing cloud is rising from the university horizon, a cloud of literature, circulars and pamphlets pouring from the university extensions and upstart correspondence schools of what-not, and threatening to shadow the whole sky. The farmhand can learn to play the piccolo in ten lessons, the mayor can learn public accounting by mail. An education dropped through a slit in the door! The universities are hardly of any use now. A few years and they will be cut off from the light altogether.

But new danger looms from the south, from Washington. Against the mushroom like business colleges learning has barely been able to hold its own; but the new foe is far more difficult to face. The government has undertaken the extinction of personal education and a scarcety of professors. We are to have education not only in our mail but on it. The bulk of the nation's correspondents will be greeted by the beaming face of George Washington, properly labeled; a smaller number for three cents receive knowledge of Abraham Lincoln; every citizen staying at home during the summer will get post cards bearing an object lesson in thrift, the picture of Benjamin Franklin. Because the ignorant foreigner must not be overlooked, he will receive on his letters a rotogravure in color of Theodore Roosevelt. Those who insist upon buying their clothes and house furnishings by mail will be edified by a print of the Yosemite Valley or of Niagara Falls on the outside of the package. The insidious part of this business, looking at it from the college viewpoint is that the victim will be receiving education when he least expects it--with his latest book catalogue for instance.

The great educational force of the future will be the postage stamp. The government has declared in connection with the recent issue of stamps: "The educational influence of distributing pictures of Americans and of places in America will be enormous". American History will be taught even to the mail-man if his bag is only full enough. To compromise with the enemy, colleges might give courses on obsolete issues and postal ethics. A college degree for stamp collectors.