kind, and not in its behalf; think, write, legislate, and live not for the interest of mankind, but only for a class; instead of eminent wisdom, justice, piety, they have eminent cunning, selfishness and want of faith. These charges are matters of allegation, judge you if they be not also matters of fact.

Now, there is a common feeling amongst men that the scholar is their debtor, and in virtue of this that they have a right to various services from him. No honest man asks the aid of a farmer or a blacksmith without intending to repay him in money; no assembly of mechanics would ask another to come two hundred miles and give them a month's work, or a day's work. Yet they will ask a scholar to do so. What gratuitous services are demanded of the physician, of the minister, of the man of science and letters in general! No poor man in Boston but thinks he has a good claim on any doctor; no culprit in danger of liberty or life but will ask the services of a lawyer wholly without recompense to plead his cause. The poorest and most neglected class of men look on every good clergyman as their missionary and minister and friend; the better educated and more powerful he is, the juster and greater do they feel their claim on him. A pirate in gaol may command the services of any Christian minister in the land. Most of the high achievements in science, letters, and art, have had no apparent pay. The pay came beforehand; in general and from God, in the greater ability, "the vision and the faculty divine," but in particular also and from men, in the opportunity afforded them by others for the use and culture thereof. Divinely and humanly they are well paid. Men feel that they have this right to the services of the scholar, in part because they dimly know that his su

perior education is purchased at the general cost. Hence, too, they are proud of the few able and accomplished men, feeling that all have a certain property therein, as having contributed their mite to the accumulation, by their divine nature related to the men of genius, by their human toil partners in the acquirements of the scholar. This feeling is not confined to men who intellectually can appreciate intellectual excellence. The little parish in the mountains, and the great parish in the city, are alike proud of the able-headed and accomplished scholar who ministers to them; though neither the poor clowns of the village nor the wealthy clowns of the metropolis could enter into his consciousness and understand his favorite pursuits or loftiest thought. Both would think it insulting to pay such a man in full proportion to his work or their receipt. Nobody offers a salary to the House of Lords; their lordship is their pay, and they must give back, in the form of justice and sound government, an equivalent for all they take in high social rank. They must pay for their nobility by being noble lords.

How shall the scholar pay for his education? He is to give a service for the service received. Thus the miller and the farmer pay one another, each paying with service in his own kind. The scholar cannot pay back bread for bread, and cloth for cloth. He must pay in the scholar's kind, not the woodman's or the weaver's. He is to represent the higher modes of human consciousness; his culture and opportunities of position fit him for that. So he is not merely to go through the routine of his profession as minister, doctor, lawyer, merchant, school-master, politician, or

maker of almanacs, and for his own advantage; he is also able to represent truth, justice, beauty, philanthropy, and religion, the highest facts of human experience; he must be common, but not vulgar, and, as a star, must dwell apart from the vulgarity of the selfish and low. He may win money without doing this, get fame and power, and thereby seem to pay mankind for their advance to him, while he rides upon their neck; but as he has not paid back the scholar's cost, and in the scholar's way, he is a debtor still, and owes for his past culture and present condition.

Such is the position of the scholar everywhere, and such his consequent obligation. But in America there are some circumstances which make the position and the duty still more important. Beside the natural aristocracy of genius, talent, and educated skill, in most countries there is also a conventional and permanent nobility based on royal or patrician descent and immoveable aristocracy. Its members monopolize the high places of society, and if not strong by nature are so by position. Those men check the natural power of the class of scholars. The descendant of some famous chief of old time takes rank before the Bacons, the Shakespeares, and the Miltons of new families,— born yesterday, to-day gladdened and gladdening with the joy of their genius,― usurps their place, and for a time "shoves away the worthy bidden guest" from the honors of the public board. Here there is no such class: a man born at all is well born; with a great nature, nobly born; the career opens to all that can run, to all men that wish to try; our aristocracy is movable, and the scholar has scope and verge enough.

Germany has the largest class of scholars; men of

talent, sometimes of genius, of great working power, exceedingly well furnished for their work, with a knowledge of the past and the present. On the whole, they seem to have a greater power of thought than the scholars of any other land. They live in a country where intellectual worth is rated at its highest value. As England is the paradise of the patrician and the millionaire, so is Germany for the man of thought; Goethe and Schiller and the Humboldts took precedence of the mere conventional aristocracy. The empire of money is for England, that of mind is for Germany. But there the scholar is positively hindered in his function by the power of the government, which allows freedom of thought, and by education tends to promote it, yet not its correlative freedom of speech, and still less the consequent of that, freedom of act. Revelations of new thought are indeed looked for, and encouraged in certain forms, but the corresponding revolution of old things is forbidden. An idea must remain an idea; the government will not allow it to become a deed, an institution, an idea organized in men. The children of the mind must be exposed to die, or if left alive their feet are cramped so that they cannot go alone; useless, joyless, and unwed, they remain in their father's house. The government seeks to establish national unity of action by the sacrifice of individual variety of action, personal freedom; every man must be a soldier and a Christian, wearing the livery of the government on the body and in the soul, and going through the spiritual exercises of the church as through the manual exercise of the camp. In a nation so enlightened, personal freedom cannot be wholly sacrificed, so thought is left free, but speech restricted by censorship, speech with the human mouth or the iron lips

of the press. Now, as of old, is there a controversy between the temporal and the spiritual powers about the investiture of the children of the soul.

Then, on the other side, the scholar is negatively impeded by the comparative ignorance of the people, by their consequent lack of administrative power and selfhelp, and their distrust of themselves. There a great illumination has gone on in the upper heavens of the learned, meteors coruscating into extraordinary glory; it has hardly dawned on the low valleys of the common people. If it shines there at all, it is but as the Northern Aurora, with a little crackling noise, lending a feeble and uncertain light, not enough to walk with, and no warmth at all; a light which disturbs the dip and alters the variation of the old historical compass, bewilders the eye, hides the stars, and yet is not bright enough to walk by without stumbling. There is a learned class, very learned and very large, with whom the scholar thinks, and for whom he writes, most uncouthly, in the language only of the schools; and if not kept in awe by the government, they are contented that a thought should remain always a thought; 'while in their own heart they disdain all authority but that of truth, justice, and love, they leave the people subject to no rule but the priest, the magistrate, and old custom, which usurp the place of reason, conscience, and affections. There is a very enlightened pulpit, and a very dull audience. In America, it is said, for every dough-faced 2 representative there is a doughfaced constituency; but in Germany there is not an intelligent people for each intelligent scholar. So on condition a great thought be true and revolutionary, it is hard to get it made a thing. Ideas go into a nunnery, not a family. Phidias must keep his awful Jove