e
considered from another point of view--they are our moral superiors
likewise. Why should they not be? It is a land not of log and pine-board
schoolhouses grudgingly erected and containing schools supported by such
niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will consent
to pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly endowed by the State and
by centuries of private benefaction. As a means of dispensing formulated
ignorance our boasted public school system is not without merit; it
spreads it out sufficiently thin to give everyone enough to make him a
more competent fool than he would have been without it; but to compare
it with that which is not the creature of legislation acting with malice
aforethought, but the unnoted outgrowth of ages, is to be ridiculous.
It is like comparing the laid-out town of a western prairie, its
right-angled streets, prim cottages, "built on the installment plan,"
and its wooden a-b-c shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, topped
with the clustered domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges;
the very names of many of whose founders have perished from human record
as have all the chronicles of the times in which they lived.

It is not alone that we have had to "subdue the wilderness;" our
educational conditions are otherwise adverse. Our political system is
unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed
in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one
will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for
instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained
intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and
a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer
and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and
pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny it in a man?

I do not claim that the political and social system that creates an
aristocracy of leisure, and consequently of intellect, is the best
possible kind of human organization; I perceive its disadvantages
clearly enough. But I do not hold that a system under which all
important public trusts, political and professional, civil and military,
ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated men--that is, men of
trained faculties and disciplined judgment--is not an altogether faulty
system.

It is only in our own country that an exacting literary taste is
believed to di