tanding on the bank of a stream, anxious but ignorant as to
how he could cross the flood. Knowledge toward the metal at his feet
gave the savage an axe; knowledge toward the tree gave him a canoe;
knowledge toward the union of canoes gave him a boat; knowledge toward
the wind added sails; knowledge toward fire and water gave him the
ocean steamer. Now, if from the captain standing on the prow of that
floating palace, the City of New York, we could take away man's
knowledge as we remove peel after peel from an onion, we would have
from the iron steamer, first, a sailboat, then a canoe, then axe and
tree, and at last a savage, naked and helpless to cross a little
stream. In the final analysis it is ignorance that wastes; it is
knowledge that saves; it is wisdom that gives precedence. If sleep is
the brother of death, ignorance is full brother to both sleep and
death. An untaught faculty is at once quiescent and dead. An ignorant
man has been defined as one "whom God has packed up and men have not
unfolded. The best forces in such a one are perpetually paralyzed.
Eyes he has, but he cannot see the length of his hand; ears he has,
and all the finest sounds in creation escape him; a tongue he has, and
it is forever blundering." A mechanic who has a chest of forty tools
and can use only the hammer, saw, and gimlet, has little chance with
his fellows and soon falls far behind. An educated mind is one fully
awakened to all the sights and scenes and forces in the world through
which he moves. This does not mean that a $2,000 man can be made out
of a two-cent boy by sending him to college. Education is
mind-husbandry; it changes the size but not the sort. But if no amount
of drill will make a Shetland pony show a two-minute gait, neither
will the thoroughbred show this speed save through long and assiduous
and patient education. The primary fountains of our Nation's wealth
are not in fields and forests and mines, but in the free schools,
churches, and printing presses. Ignorance breeds misery, vice, and
crime. Mephistopheles was a cultured devil, but he is the exception.
History knows no illiterate seer or sage or saint. No Dante or
Shakespeare ever had to make "his X mark."

When John Cabot Lodge made his study of the distribution of ability in
the United States, he found that in ninety years five of the great
Western States had produced but twenty-seven men who were mentioned in
the American and English encyclopedias, while lit