ion.

The antidotes against this organic egotism are--the range and variety
of attractions, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of
merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and
with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel,
society, solitude.

The hardiest skeptic, who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or
who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas,
will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the
most vicious of all wild beasts"; and, in the same spirit, the old
English poet Gascoigne says, "A boy is better unborn than untaught." The
city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a different
style; the sea another; the army a fourth. We know that an army which
can be confided in may be formed by discipline,--that by systematic
discipline all men may be made heroes. Marshal Lannes said to a French
officer, "Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he
never was afraid." A great part of courage is the courage of having done
the thing before. And, in all human action, those faculties will be
strong which are used. Robert Owen said, "Give me a tiger, and I will
educate him." 'Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of education,
since to meliorate is the law of Nature; and men are valued precisely as
they exert onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, poltroonery
is the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people
who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given
to your words, or any humor,--but remain literalists, after hearing the
music and poetry and rhetoric and wit of seventy or eighty years. They
are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand
pitchforks and the cry of "Fire!"--and I have noticed in some of this
class a marked dislike of earthquakes.

Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an
after-work, a poor patching. We are always a little late. The evil is
done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal
of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting. We shall
one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our
root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only
medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up,--namely, in Education.

Our arts an