squeamish heart-burnings." The credit on account of the hardy fathers is not without limit. It is soon exhausted; especially in a land where the atmosphere, the institutions, and the youth of the people all excite to premature and excessive prodigality of effort. The body takes a mortgage on the spendthrift spirit, demands certain regular periodic payments, and will one day foreclose for breach of condition, impede the spirit's action in the premises, putting a very disagreeable keeper there, and finally expel the prodigal mortgagor. So it often happens that a man who in his youth scorned a pecuniary debt to mankind and would receive no favor, even to buy culture with, has yet unconsciously and against his will, contracted debts which trouble him in manhood, and impede his action all his life; with swollen feet and blear eyes famous Griesbach pays for the austere heroism of his penurious and needy youth. The rosy bud of genius on the poor man's tree, too often opens into a lean and ghastly flower. Could not Burns tell us this?

With the rare exceptions just hinted at, any man of a superior culture owes for it when obtained. Sometimes the debt is obvious; a farmer with small means and a large family sends the most hopeful of his sons to college. Look at the cost of the boy's culture. His hands are kept from work that his mind may be free. He fares on daintier food, wears more and more costly garments. Other members of the family must feed and clothe him, earn his tuition-fees, buy his books, pay for his fuel and room-rent. For this the father rises earlier than of old, yoking the oxen a great while before day of a winter's morning, and toils till long after dark of a winter's night, enduring cold and hardship. For this the mother stints her frugal fare,

her humble dress; for this the brothers must forego sleep and pastime, must toil harder, late and early both; for this the sisters must seek new modes of profitable work, must wear their old finery long after it is finery no more. The spare wealth of the family, stinted to spare it, is spent on this one youth. From the father to the daughters, all lay their bones to extraordinary work for him; the whole family is pinched in body that this one youth may go brave and full. Even the family horse pays his tax to raise the educa

tion fee.

Men see the hopeful scholar, graceful and accomplished, receiving his academic honors, but they see not the hard-featured father standing unheeded in the aisle, nor the older sister in an obscure corner of the gallery, who had toiled in the factory for the favored brother, tending his vineyard, her own not kept; who had perhaps learned the letters of Greek to hear him recite the grammar at home. Father and sister know not a word of the language in which his diploma is writ and delivered. At what cost of the family tree is this one flower produced? How many leaves, possible blossoms, yea, possible branches, have been absorbed to create this one flower, which shall perpetuate the kind, after being beautiful and fragrant in its own season? Yet, while these leaves are growing for the blossom's sake, and the life of the tree is directed thither with special and urgent emphasis, the difference between branch and blossom, leaf and petal, is getting more and more. By and by the two cannot comprehend each other; the acorn has forgotten the leaf which reared it, and thinks itself of another kin. Grotius, who speaks a host of languages, talking with the learned of all countries and of every age, has forgot his mother

tongue, and speech is at end with her that bore him. The son, accomplished with many a science, many an art, ceases to understand the simple consciousness of his father and mother. They are proud of him, that he has outgrown them; he ashamed of them when they visit him amid his scholarly company. To them he is a philosopher, they only clowns in his eyes. He learns to neglect, perhaps to despise them, and forgets his obligation and his debt. Yet by their rudeness is it that he is refined. His science and literary skill are purchased by their ignorance and uncouthness of manner and of speech. Had the educational cost been equally divided all had still continued on a level; he had known no Latin, but the whole family might have spoken good English. (For all the difference which education made betwixt him and his kinsfolk he is a debtor.

In New England you sometimes see extremes of social condition brought together. The blue-frocked father, well advanced, but hale as an October morning, jostles into Boston in a milk-cart, his red-cheeked grand-daughter beside him, also coming for some useful daily work, while the youngest son, cultured at the cost of that grand-daughter's sire and by that father's toil, is already a famous man; perhaps also a proud one, eloquent at the bar, or powerful in the pulpit, or mighty in the senate. The family was not rich enough to educate all the children after this costly sort; one becomes famous, the rest are neglected, obscure, and perhaps ignorant; the cultivated son has little sympathy with them. So the men that built up the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Milan slept in mean hutches of mud and straw, dirty, cold, and wet; the finished tower looks proudly down upon the lowly thatch, all

heedless of the cost at which itself arose. It is plain that this man owes for his education, it is plain whom he owes. But all men of a superior culture, though born to wealth, get their education in the same way, only there is this additional mischief to complicate the matter; the burden of self-denial is not borne by the man's own family, but by other fathers and mothers, other brothers and sisters. They also pay the cost of his culture, bear the burden for no special end, and have no personal or family joy in the success; they do not even know the scholar they help to train. They who hewed the topstone of society are far away when it is hoisted up with shouting. Most of the youths now-adays trained at Harvard College are the sons of rich men, yet they also, not less, are educated at the public charge; beneficiaries not of the "Hopkins' Fund," 1 but of the whole community. Society is not yet rich enough to afford so generous a culture to all who ask, who deserve, or who would pay for it a hundred-fold. The accomplished man who sits in his well-endowed scholarship at Oxford, or rejoices to be "Master of Trinity," though he have the estate of the Westminsters and Sutherlands behind him, is still the beneficiary of the public and owes for his schooling.

In the general way, among the industrious classes of New England, a boy earns his living after he is twelve years old. If he gets the superior education of the scholar solely by the pecuniary aid of his father or others, when he is twenty-five and enters on his profession,-law, medicine, or divinity, politics, schoolkeeping, or trade, he has not earned his Latin grammar; has rendered no appreciable service to mankind; others have worked that he might study, and taught that he might learn. He has not paid the first cent

towards his own schooling; he is indebted for it to the whole community. The ox-driver in the fields, the paver in the city streets, the laborer on the railroad, the lumberer in the woods, the girl in the factory, each has a claim on him. If he despises these persons or cuts himself off from sympathy with them, if he refuses to perform his function for them after they have done their possible to fit him for it, he is not only the perpetual and ungrateful debtor, but is more guilty than the poor man's son who forgets the family that sent him to college; for that family consciously and willingly made the sacrifice, and got some satisfaction for it in the visible success of their scheme, nay, are sometimes proud of the pride which scorns them, while with the mass of men thus slighted there is no return for their sacrifice. They did their part, faithfully did it; their beneficiary forgets his function.

The democratic party in New England does not much favor the higher seminaries of education. There has long been a suspicion against them in the mass of the community, and among the friends of the public education of the people a serious distrust. This is the philosophy of that discontent: public money spent on the higher seminaries is so much taken from the humbler schools, so much taken from the colleges of all for the college of the few; men educated at such cost have not adequately repaid the public for the sacrifice made on their account; men of superior education have not been eminently the friends of mankind, they do not eminently represent truth, justice, philanthropy, and piety; they do not point men to lofty human life and go thitherward in advance of mankind; their superior education has narrowed their sympathies, instead of widening; they use their opportunities against man