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is a source of national weakness. The prevalence of vulgarity is a national disgrace.

The earth has never presented a scene of more superb and widespread affluence than that which is to-day displayed in the great West, which has already become the chief seat of the power, as well as of the wealth, of our country. Nature has there offered the most splendid opportunities to human energies, and, during a hundred years, men have had perfect security and freedom in the enjoyment of these opportunities. They have succeeded in building up commonwealth after commonwealth in which there is almost universal material well-being. It is right and easy to sing pæans over such achievements. It is difficult for those who have accomplished, and who share in, such success, not to become elated with it. But the West is at a great disadvantage, as regards civilization, in the very fact of the vast scale and enormous growth of her prosperity. The imagination of her people has been touched by them, and their ideas have been shaped by them. Cut off by her impregnable position from direct relation with the seats of former culture, with no elevated traditions of her own, removed from the immediate influence of foreign interests, the West has naturally grown up insensible, in great measure, to the higher responsibilities involved in her unexampled opportunities, and comparatively indifferent to her share in the common inheritance of the treasures of thought and experience of the race. She has subordinated the concerns of the spirit to those of the body, and she is now paying the penalty, in the possession of wealth without due sense of its right use, in the dim, self-reproachful recognition of aims and instincts of the spirit long stunted by want of exercise, which now vaguely seek for satisfaction, and, finally, in the development of a popular life without resources, without elevation, without interest. The very energy displayed in the attainment of material things, may, indeed, now that the means of culture have been so abundantly secured, exhibit itself in acquiring the culture itself. Yet the prevailing spirit of the West, as shown in its public utterances, in its journals, in its poetry, in its politics, is not promising. It is not modest; it is not serious; it is not largeminded; it is not high-minded. In a word, it exaggerates the defects in the spirit and temper of the country at large.

On the solution of the problem how this spirit is to be improved, how the dangers resulting from materialism, and from the mediocrity and vulgarity that too generally accompany equality, are to

be removed or lessened, and on the application of the solution, the future of our country depends.

Much may be hoped from the dissatisfaction with the barrenness that now prevails in the fields of the higher intellectual life, from the sense of the lack of interest, and from the absence of large original sources of pleasure, refreshment, and invigoration of the spirit. And the more this dissatisfaction is felt, the more clear should be the recognition that the most direct remedy lies in the wider diffusion of the higher education,-that education by which the powers of thought are developed, and the moral energies strengthened and rightly directed.

The conception of a liberal education, an education that enlarges the scope of mental vision, invigorates the understanding, confirms the reason, quickens and disciplines the imagination, and, instilling into the soul of youth the sense of proportion between the things of the spirit and the things of sense, animates it with ambitions that are safeguards of character not less than motives of action, strengthening it against the multiform temptations to worldliness, which means selfishness, and to acceptance of popular standards of judgment, which means superficiality, inspiring it with the love of what is best in thought, and in those arts which are the expression of the ideal conceptions and aims of men,-the conception of an education such as this has grown faint among us. It needs revival and reinvigoration, not in the interest of the few, a select and eminent class, but in the interest of the many, of the whole community. For the condition of healthy, progressive life in a democracy like ours, the condition on which order, confidence, credit, and stability permanently depend, is the existence of a reasonable correspondence between its spiritual and its physical elements, between its mental and its material development. This correspondence is to be secured only by means of the highest attainable level of education. The education of the common school, even if universal, is not enough. Nor will the professional and scientific school, however excellent in its kind, supply what is needed. There must be a higher education still, —an education that shall train men to set a true value on the things of the spirit, as compared with those of the flesh, and to seek for wisdom as better than wealth; "for wisdom is a defence and money is a defence, but the excellency of wisdom is that it giveth life to them that have it." Wise men may, indeed, sometimes be found among those who have had no advantages of formal education, but

whose faculties have been disciplined by the hard experience of life, and by the culture which their own genius has supplied. Lincoln stands as the supreme example of men of this sort,-a man schooled by nature, circumstance, and his own heart; the equal of the greatest figures in history; the poor wise man who, by his wisdom, delivered the city. For nature had endowed him with a force of character that enabled him to make the best of life. But such endowment is as rare as it is precious, and it would be as wise to trust to a chance scattering of the seed to produce an abundant harvest, as to rely on the fortuitous conjunction of favoring elements for the supply of strong wise men, the leaders and helpers of their kind. Culture is as much needed for human beings as for the products of the earth. The value of education, in its proper sense, is not rendered questionable by the occasional appearance of men wise with a wisdom not acquired in the schools, and beyond that which they have power to impart.

It is to the institutions which provide the means of the highest education that the best interests of our national life are specially committed, for it is mainly through them that the advance of its intellectual development can be made to keep pace with its material progress. Upon them, more than upon any other of its institutions, the destiny of modern democracy depends. It is they that are the chief barriers against the ever-rising tide of ignorance and materialism. If life in America is to become worthy of its unparalleled opportunities; if the moral sentiments and principles of the people are to be maintained, uncorrupted by the enormous temptations of a merely sensual materialism; if intelligence is to be preserved sufficiently sound and active in the community to keep alive that selfcriticism upon which improvement depends, and that self-control which is the root of due obedience to law; if our civilization is to be prevented from degenerating into a glittering barbarism of immeasurable vulgarity and essential feebleness; if our material prosperity is to become but the symbol and source of mental energy and moral excellence,-it is by the support, the increase, the steady improvement of the institutions devoted to the highest education of youth.

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.

NEW PRINCIPLES IN EDUCATION.

Erfahren lehrt fahren. Experience teaches progress.—German Proverb.

IF any genius should ever take it into his head to write a work of transcendental humor, or humor founded on a deep philosophical principle, like the Sanscrit Baïtal Pachisi, he may find it in the universal human conviction that all things to which we are accustomed, or what we like, are founded on immutable and eternal truth and justice, and that, per contra, what is foreign to us is "unnatural." When we reflect that, with the exception of mother's milk, nearly all palatal tastes are acquired, the cordial detestation with which the untravelled provincial of any country regards the cuisine of another is, from a general stand-point, deeply amusing. The writer has seen a sternly common-sensible New-Englander indignant even to rage at beholding a man drink eau sucré; he has dined with Egyptians who could not comprehend that there were in this world people who did not like assafœtida in a ragout, and has known a lady who sincerely believed that nobody in the world ever really enjoyed eating olives. He has known old East-Indians to taunt one another for liking or disliking that "dreadful devil's fruit, the durian," and has met with Bostonians who believed that any man in the world must love pork and beans, if he would only "just try them once," and who were equally persuaded that sauer-kraut was not fit for pigs. Yet even deeper seated are most intellectual or moral convictions, though history shows that what is the unnatural crime, "contrary to all human instincts," of one country, may be a sacrament, associated with everything that is holy and pure, in another, as is shown by the customs of that eminently conservative and strict race, the ancient Egyptians. However, there have been cosmopolite travellers who have laughed at food-prejudice, and now and then, though very rarely, some daring analyst, de abditis rerum causis, who has speculated, like the Kentuckian who sincerely wondered "why God made the Dimmycrats," on the differences of opinion in mankind. Horace and Martial and many more agreed with the proverb-makers that "what is one man's meat is another man's poison," and, in fact,

the number of popular sayings to this effect is in striking contradiction to the universal conviction.

But there is one belief which has never been contradicted, which is, that every man is born with a certain "capacity," or just so much "mind," or is naturally gifted or limited to an extent which virtually admits of no great increase. The quartz or diamond may be cut and polished or set, but it can never change its nature. Modern chemical analysis, led by Lockyer, is, however, tending to the theory of a prima materia, from which quartz or diamond is developed; while as regards Man, works are beginning to appear in which the authors endeavor to prove that certain faculties, such as memory, quickness of perception, attention, and interest, may, in connection with the artistic or constructive power, be so developed, by a judicious system of education, as to produce a result hitherto undreamed-of.

"Undreamed-of" is the word, since in all the speculations and visions of all the philosophers, seers, sorcerers, Cabalists, Neo-Platonists, Rosicrucians, Esoteric Buddhists, and Occultists of every age, there is no suspicion that man can receive any gift save from mystical illumination. The only exception to this, and the only gleam of true, clear light, is to be found in the New Testament, in Christ's teaching that all men are equal before God, and that there is one law of truth for high or low; from which we infer that under all natural disadvantages there are a deep-lying republicanism and a basis for infinite development. And, strange as it may seem to those who are accustomed widely to disassociate the two, there is in the works of Spinoza, and especially in the Tractatus Theologico-politicus, the most earnest conviction of the same great principle of humanity. Beyond allowing man all his natural rights, lies the step of making the utmost of all there is in him, which is the most advanced Christianity. The overwhelming mystery and miracle of the New Tes tament, before which all others shrink into nothing, is the incredible right-otherwise capacity-which it recognizes in all men. This was speedily exemplified in the training of humble fishermen and their like, and sending them forth to fill exalted missions. We admit that they were inspired; but be it observed that the miracle of inspiration never ceased, since to this day, wherever pure Christianity has acted in spirit and in truth, the poor or humble man has always enjoyed more privileges than under any other social system.

In the system of education to which I have referred, and according to which it is assumed that, by an easy and gradual process,

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