The ancients said, "Know thyself;" the nineteenth century says, "Help
thyself." Self-culture gives a second birth to the soul. A liberal
education is a true regeneration. When a man is once liberally
educated, he will generally remain a man, not shrink to a manikin, nor
dwindle to a brute. But if he is not properly educated, if he has
merely been crammed and stuffed through college, if he has merely a
broken-down memory from trying to hold crammed facts enough to pass the
examination, he will continue to shrink and shrivel and dwindle, often
below his original proportions, for he will lose both his confidence
and self-respect, as his crammed facts, which never became a part of
himself, evaporate from his distended memory. Many a youth has made
his greatest effort in his graduating essay. But, alas! the beautiful
flowers of rhetoric blossomed only to exhaust the parent stock, which
blossoms no more forever.

In Strasburg geese are crammed with food several times a day by opening
their mouths and forcing the pabulum down the throat with the finger.
The geese are shut up in boxes just large enough to hold them, and are
not allowed to take any exercise. This is done in order to increase
enormously the liver for _pate de fois gras_. So are our youth
sometimes stuffed with education. What are the chances for success of
students who "cut" recitations or lectures, and gad, lounge about, and
dissipate in the cities at night until the last two or three weeks,
sometimes the last few days, before examination, when they employ
tutors at exorbitant prices with the money often earned by hard-working
parents, to stuff their idle brains with the pabulum of knowledge; not
to increase their grasp or power of brain, not to discipline it, not
for assimilation into the mental tissue to develop personal power, but
to fatten the memory, the liver of the brain; to fatten it with crammed
facts until it is sufficiently expanded to insure fifty per cent. in
the examination.

True teaching will create a thirst for knowledge, and the desire to
quench this thirst will lead the eager student to the Pierian spring.
"Man might be so educated that all his prepossessions would be truth,
and all his feelings virtues."

Every bit of education or culture is of great advantage in the struggle
for existence. The microscope does not create anything new, but it
reveals marvels. To educate the eye adds to its magnifying power until
it sees beaut