him with the love of truth, and makes him
understand that sham is shame.

His progress may be slow; but he will persevere, he will have faith in
the power of labor and of time, and when in after years we shall look
about for a man with some Diogenes' lantern, there are a thousand
chances to one that when we find him we shall find him country-born, not
city-bred. Too soon is the town-boy made self-conscious; he is
precocious; all the tricks and devices of civilization are known to
him; all artifices and contrivances he sees in shop-windows; the street,
the theatre, the newspaper are the rivals of the home, and they quickly
teach him irreverence and disobedience. He loses innocence, experience
of evil gives him flippant views. He becomes wise in his own conceit;
having eyes only for the surfaces of things, he easily persuades himself
that he knows all. Of such a youth how shall any college make an
enlightened, a noble, and a reverent man? But the home and the
neighborhood are not our whole environment. As we are immersed in an
atmospheric ocean, so do we swim in the current of our national life. To
praise this life is easy. We all see and feel how vigorous it is, how
confident, how eager. Here is a world of busy men and women, active in
many directions. They found States, they build cities, they create
wealth, they discuss all problems, they try all experiments, they hurry
on to new tasks, and think they have done nothing while aught remains to
do.

They live in the midst of the excitement of ever-recurring elections, of
speculation, of financial schemes and commercial enterprises. It is an
unrestful, feverish, practical life, in which all the strong natures are
thinking of doing something, of gaining something,--a life in the
market-place, where high thought and noble conduct are all but
impossible, where the effort to make one's self a man, instead of
striving to get so many thousands of money, would seem ridiculous. It is
a life of inventions and manufactures, of getting and spending, in which
we bring forth and consume in a single century what it has taken Nature
many thousand years to hoard. Our aim is to have more rather than to be
more; our ideal is that of material progress; our praise is given to
those who invent and discover the means of augmenting wealth. Liberty is
opportunity to get rich; education is the development of the
money-getting faculty. Our national life may, of course, be looked at
from many side