their travels but a catalogue of trivial annoyances. But people of this
kind do not generally belong to families on whom wealth has had time to
produce its best effects. What I mean is, that a family which has been
for generations in the habit of spending four thousand a year will
usually be found to have a more cultivated one than one that has only
spent four hundred.

I have come to the recognition of this truth very reluctantly indeed,
not because I dislike rich people, but merely because they are
necessarily a very small minority, and I should like every human being
to have the best benefits of culture if it were only possible. The plain
living and high thinking that Wordsworth so much valued is a cheering
ideal, for most men have to live plainly, and if they could only think
with a certain elevation we might hope to solve the great problem of
human life, the reconciliation of poverty and the soul. There certainly
is a slow movement in that direction, and the shortening of the hours of
labor may afford some margin of leisure; but we who work for culture
every day and all day long, and still feel that we know very little, and
have hardly skill enough to make any effective use of the little that we
know, can scarcely indulge in very enthusiastic anticipations of the
future culture of the poor.

Still, there are some things that may be rationally and truly said to a
poor man who desires culture, and which are not without a sort of
Spartan encouragement. You are restricted by your poverty, but it is not
always a bad thing to be restricted, even from the intellectual point of
view. The intellectual powers of well-to-do people are very commonly
made ineffective by the enormous multiplicity of objects that are
presented to their attention, and which claim from them a sort of polite
notice like the greeting of a great lady to each of her thousand guests.
It requires the very rarest strength of mind, in a rich man, to
concentrate his attention on anything there are so many things that he
is expected to make a pretence of knowing; but nobody expects _you_ to
know anything, and this is an incalculable advantage. I think that all
poor men who have risen to subsequent distinction have been greatly
indebted to this independence of public opinion as to what they ought to
know. In trying to satisfy that public opinion by getting up a pretence
of various sorts of knowledge, which is only a sham, we sacrifice not
only much precious