tle Massachusetts had
2,686 authors, orators, philosophers, and builders of States. But
analysis shows that the variance is one of education and ideas. Boston
differs from Quebec as differ their methods of instruction. The New
England settlers were Oxford and Cambridge men that represented the
best blood, brain, and accumulated culture of old England. Landing in
the forest they clustered their cabins around the building that was at
once church, school, library, and town hall. Rising early and sitting
up late they plied their youth with ideas of liberty and intelligence.
They came together on Sunday morning at nine o'clock to listen to a
prayer one hour long, a sermon of three hours, and after a cold lunch
heard a second brief sermon of two hours and a half--those who did not
die became great. What Sunday began the week continued. We may smile
at their methods but we must admire the men they produced. Mark the
intellectual history of Northampton. During its history this town has
sent out 114 lawyers, 112 ministers, 95 physicians, 100 educators, 7
college presidents, 30 professors, 24 editors, 6 historians, 14
authors, among whom are George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley,
Professor Whitney, the late J.G. Holland; 38 officers of State, 28
officers of the United States, including members of the Senate, and
one President.[1] How comes it that this little colony has raised up
this great company of authors, statesmen, reformers? No mere chance is
working here. The relation between sunshine and harvest is not more
essential than the relation between these folk and their renowned
descendants. Fruit after his kind is the divine explanation of
Northampton's influence upon the nation. "Education makes men great"
is the divine dictum. George William Curtis has said: "The
Revolutionary leaders were all trained men, as the world's leaders
always have been from the day when Themistocles led the educated
Athenians at Salamis, to that when Von Moltke marshaled the educated
Germans against France. The sure foundations of states are laid in
knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book
learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind,
is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national
degeneration and ruin."

Consider, also, how the misfits of life affect man's value. The
successful man grasps the handle of his being. He moves in the line of
least resistance. That one accomplishes mos