THE ADVANTAGES OF IGNORANCE. 337 



THE ADVANTAGES OF IGNOKANCE. 



By Professor F. W. CLAKKE. 



THE occasional blissfulness of ignorance has long been the subject 

 of one of our most popular proverbs. Coupled with a positive 

 statement as to the folly of wisdom, it passes from mouth to mouth 

 with the authority of an oracle. But the support given to the dogma 

 is usually of a passive kind. The doctrine is stated, but not defended ; 

 while on the other hand our journals teem with arguments in favor of 

 education, upon the importance of schools, and about the best methods 

 of electing school trustees. The fact that the latter represent in their 

 own persons the advantages of ignorance that educated men can 

 rarely attain to such superior positions is never urged with anything 

 like proper vigor. Education in one's self imbues one with prejudices 

 concerning the education of others ; and such prejudices, with their 

 attendant partialities, ought to be rigidly excluded from the manage- 

 ment of public institutions. Accordingly, in actual practice, unedu- 

 cated men are placed as supervisors above thousands of cultivated 

 teachers ; and thus, in spite of the schools, the superiority of ignorance 

 is clearly demonstrated. 



In every walk of life, in all professions, a similar superiority is daily 

 manifest. At the polls, the trained and intelligent statesman is de- 

 feated by the loud-mouthed stump-speaker, who knows nothing of 

 jurisprudence, less of political economy, and only enough of finance to 

 be able to draw and spend his salary with commendable regularity. 

 The broadly educated, highly cultivated theologian is surjDassed in 

 popular esteem by the swaggering revivalist, who tears up human feel- 

 ings by the roots as a child pulls up sprouting beans for growing the 

 wrong way. In medicine, the quack has five times the patronage of 

 the well-informed physician, and makes a fat living where the latter 

 would only starve. Sick people are fond of liberal treatment, and like 

 to be thought worse off than they really are. You have a slight cold, 

 and a good doctor charges five dollars for curing you. But the bril- 

 liant empiric calls it congestion of the lungs, diphtheria, or pneumonia, 

 visits you twice as often, and charges three times as much, and you feel 

 that you have got a great deal more for your money. Your own 

 ignorance chimes in with his, and both are better satisfied. Your 

 stomach-ache is magnified into gastric fever ; your boil becomes an 

 incipient cancer ; a slight chill indicates approaching typhoid. The 

 quack flatters your self-love, exalts your own importance in exag- 

 gerating that of your disease, comforts you with a good, sympathetic 

 scare, and depletes your veins and your pockets with admirable equa- 

 nimity. 



The old saying that " fools rush in where angels fear to tread " 



VOL. XVIII. 22 



