take home as a surprise. In
this way, whole classes in America, the English counterparts of which
rarely read anything more formidable than a penny paper, acquired the
habit of book-buying and the ambition to form a small library. The
benefit to the people cannot be computed.

Incidentally, as we know, not a little injustice was done to English
authors by the pirating of their books, without recompense, while the
copyright still lived. It was after I went to America, though I had
heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford, that I first read _Fors Clavigera_ and
_Sesame and Lilies_ in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and,
about the same time, Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ in the _Franklin Square
Library_, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb
and part of De Quincey, _Don Quixote_ and _Rasselas_ (those four for
some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all
bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume--the price of two daily
newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or one
blacking of one's shoes. Much has, of course, been done of late years in
England in popularising the "Classics" in the form of cheap libraries;
but the facilities for buying the books--or rather the temptations to do
so--are incomparably less, while the relative prices remain higher.

Even at fourpence halfpenny (supposing them to be purchasable at the
price) Lamb's Essays still cost more in London than a drink of whiskey.
In America, more than twenty years ago, the whiskey cost half as much
again as the book.

All of which is in the nature of a digression, but it has not led us far
from the main road, for the object that I am aiming at is to convey to
the English reader some idea of what the forces are which are at work on
the education of the American people. The Englishman generally knows
that in the United States there is nothing analogous to the great public
schools of England--Winchester, Westminster, Eton, and the rest--and
that they have a host of more or less absurd universities in no way to
be compared to Oxford or Cambridge. The American, as has been said,
challenges the latter statement bluntly; while, as for the public
schools, he maintains that it is not the American ideal (if he wished to
fortify his position, he might say it was not an Anglo-Saxon ideal) to
produce a limited privileged and cultivated class, but that the aim is
to educate the whole nation to the highest leve