e as their
clothes fit them. We do not even want their clothes to fit them. The
people themselves do not want it. Our modern life is an elaborate and
organised endeavour, on the part of almost every person in it, to escape
from being fitted, either in knowledge or in anything else. The first
symptom of civilisation--of the fact that a man is becoming
civilised--is that he wishes to appear to belong where he does not. It
is looked upon as the spirit of the age. He wishes to be learned, that
no one may find out how little he knows. He wishes to be religious, that
no one may see how wicked he is. He wishes to be respectable, that no
one may know that he does not respect himself. The result mocks at us
from every corner in life. Society is a struggle to get into the wrong
clothes. Culture is a struggle to learn the things that belong to some
one else. Black Mollie (who is the cook next door) presented her
betrothed last week--a stable hand on the farm--with an eight-dollar
manicure set. She did not mean to sum up the condition of culture in the
United States in this simple and tender act. But she did.

Michael O'Hennessy, who lives under the hill, sums it up also. He has
just bought a brougham in which he and Mrs. O'H. can be seen almost any
pleasant Sunday driving in the Park. It is not to be denied that Michael
O'Hennessy, sitting in his brougham, is a genuinely happy-looking
object. But it is not the brougham itself that Michael enjoys. What he
enjoys is the fact that he has bought the brougham, and that the
brougham belongs to some one else. Mrs. John Brown-Smith, who presides
at our tubs from week to week, and who comes to us in a brilliant silk
waist (removed for business), has just bought a piano to play _Hold the
Fort_ on, with one finger, when the neighbours are passing by--a fact
which is not without national significance, which sheds light upon
schools and upon college catalogues and learning-shows, and upon
educational conditions through the whole United States.

It would be a great pity if a man could not know the things that have
always belonged before, to other men to know, and it is the essence of
culture that he should, but his appearing to know things that belong to
some one else--his desire to appear to know them--heaps up darkness. The
more things there are a man knows without knowing the inside of them--the
spirit of them--the more kinds of an ignoramus he is. It is not enough
to say that the learned m