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flatter, nor to make the worse appear the better reason. Literary charm and perfection of style did not satisfy him; but he demanded that justice should be upheld and right sought for with singleness of aim.

G. W. C.

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I

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Men of a superior culture get it at the cost of the whole community, and therefore at first owe for their education. They must pay back an equivalent or else remain debtors to mankind, debtors for ever; that is, beggars or thieves, such being the only class that are thus perpetually in debt and a burden to the race.

The

It is true that every man, the rudest Prussian boor as well as von Humboldt, is indebted to mankind for his culture, to their past history and their existing institutions, to their daily toil. Taking the whole culture into the account, the debt bears about the same ratio to the receipt in all men. I speak not of genius, the inborn faculty which costs mankind nothing, only of the education thereof, which the man obtains. Irishman who can only handle his spade, wear his garments, talk his wild brogue, and bid his beads, has four or five hundred generations of ancestors behind him, and is as long descended and from as old a stock as the accomplished patrician scholar at Oxford and Berlin. The Irishman depends on them all, and on the present generation, for his culture. But he has obtained his development with no special outlay and cost of the human race. In getting that rude culture he has appropriated nothing to himself which is taken from another man's share. He has paid as he went along, so he owes nothing in particular for his education; and mankind has no claim on him as for value received. But the Oxford graduate has been a long time at school

and college, not earning but learning; living therefore at the cost of mankind, with an obligation and an implied promise to pay back when he comes of age and takes possession of his educated faculties. He therefore has not only the general debt which he shares with all men, but an obligation quite special and peculiar for his support while at study.

This rule is general, and applies to the class of educated men, with some apparent exceptions, and a very few real ones. Some men are born of poor but strongbodied parents, and endowed with great abilities; they inherit nothing except their share of the general civilization of mankind, and the onward impulse which that has given. These men devote themselves to study; and having behind them an ancestry of broad-shouldered, hard-handed, stalwart, temperate men, and deepbosomed, red-armed, and industrious mothers, they are able to do the work of two or three men at the time. Such men work while they study; they teach while they learn; they hew their own way through the wood by superior strength and skill born in their bones, with an axe themselves have chipped out from the stone, or forged of metal, or paid for with the result of their first hewings. They are specially indebted to nobody for their culture. They pay as they go, owing the academic ferryman nothing for setting them over into the elysium of the scholar.

Only few men ever make this heroic and crucial experiment. None but poor men's sons essay the trial. Nothing but poverty has whips sharp enough to sting indolent men, even of genius, to such exertion of the manly part. But even this proud race often runs into another debt; they run up long scores with the body, which must one day be paid "with aching head and

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