Abstract

The Tyranny of Books

Author H.G. Wells, in his admirable work "The Future in America," confesses that his stay in Boston was made uneasy by the frightful effort it cost him to "conceal gaps in his intellectual baggage." The experience may be met with in places other than Boston, it is, in fact, almost inevitable for those whose education has been acquired in modern colleges. Inevitable, that is, when these graduates, possessed of a scattered knowledge of this or that political science, labor problems and biology thrown into the society of the older generation whose intellectual life has been passed with the Latin, Greek and English classics, whose philosophy is of the vintage of Plato and Descartes and whose political economy is confined to "The Wealth of Nations" and the early works of the political scientist John Stuart Mill.