A college or university education does not necessarily make a man learned;
it only gives him the opportunity to learn. It is said
that some college men have proven themselves to be quite ignorant,
or rather that they do not know so much as those who have been self-taught.
I do not in any way wish to disparage a college education;
no doubt men who have been trained in a university start in life
with better prospects and with a greater chance of success,
but those men who have not had such advantages have doubtless done much
to make their country great and prosperous, and they ought to be recognized
as great men.
The general desire of the American people to travel abroad
is one of their good traits. People who never leave their homes
cannot know much. A person may become well-informed by reading,
but his practical knowledge cannot be compared with that of a person
who has travelled. We Chinese are great sinners in this regard.
A Chinese maxim says, "It is dangerous to ride on horseback or to go
on a voyage": hence until very recently we had a horror of going abroad.
A person who remains all his life in his own town is generally narrow-minded,
self-opinioned, and selfish. The American people are free from these faults.
It is not only the rich and the well-to-do who visit foreign countries,
but tradesmen and workmen when they have saved a little money
also often cross the Atlantic. Some years ago a Senator in Washington told me
that he crossed the Atlantic Ocean every summer and spent several months
in Europe, and that the next trip would be his twenty-eighth voyage.
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