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It is not an unreasonable demand of the majority that the few who have the advantages of the training of college and university should exhibit the breadth and sweetness of a generous culture, and should shed everywhere that light which ennobles common things, and without which life is like one of the old landscapes in which the artist forgot to put sunlight. One of the reasons why the college-bred man does not meet this reasonable expectation is that his training, too often, has not been thorough and conscientious, it has not been of himself; he has acquired, but he is not educated. Another is that, if he is educated, he is not impressed with the intimacy of his relation to that which is below him as well as that which is above him, and his culture is out of sympathy with the great mass that needs it, and must have it, or it will remain a blind force in the world, the lever of demagogues who preach social anarchy and misname it progress. There is no culture so high, no taste so fastidious, no grace of learning so delicate, no refinement of art so exquisite, that it cannot at this hour find full play for itself in the broadest fields of humanity; since it is all needed to soften the attritions of common life, and guide to nobler aspirations the strong materialistic influences of our restless society.

One reason, as I said, for the gulf between the majority and the select few to be educated is, that the college does not seldom disappoint the reasonable expectation concerning it. The graduate of the carpenter’s shop knows how to use his tools–or used to in days before superficial training in trades became the rule. Does the college graduate know how to use his tools? Or has he to set about fitting himself for some employment, and gaining that culture, that training of himself, that utilization of his information which will make him necessary in the world? There has been a great deal of discussion whether a boy should be trained in the classics or mathematics or sciences or modern languages. I feel like saying “yes” to all the various propositions. For Heaven’s sake train him in something, so that he can handle himself, and have free and confident use of his powers. There isn’t a more helpless creature in the universe than a scholar with a vast amount of information over which he has no control. He is like a man with a load of hay so badly put upon his cart that it all slides off before he can get to market. The influence of a man on the world is generally proportioned to his ability to do something. When Abraham Lincoln was running for the Legislature the first time, on the platform of the improvement of the navigation of the Sangamon River, he went to secure the votes of thirty men who were cradling a wheat field. They asked no questions about internal improvements, but only seemed curious whether Abraham had muscle enough to represent them in the Legislature. The obliging man took up a cradle and led the gang round the field. The whole thirty voted for him.

What is scholarship? The learned Hindu can repeat I do not know how many thousands of lines from the Vedas, and perhaps backwards as well as forwards. I heard of an excellent old lady who had counted how many times the letter A occurs in the Holy Scriptures. The Chinese students who aspire to honors spend years in verbally memorizing the classics –Confucius and Mencius–and receive degrees and public advancement upon ability to transcribe from memory without the error of a point, or misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the whole of some books of morals. You do not wonder that China is today more like an herbarium than anything else. Learning is a kind of fetish, and it has no influence whatever upon the great inert mass of Chinese humanity.