668 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



immigration, whose heterogeneity tends to counteract the unifying in- 

 fluence of our education. This, however, can not always last, and we 

 shall hope in vain if we hope to escape the effects of those influences 

 which are shaping the destinies of other nations. True, we permit par- 

 ents to educate their own children, but at the same time we tax them 

 to support the education of all; and we shall find but few who are able 

 and still fewer who are willing to pay others to educate their children 

 and then do it themselves. So our system is virtually a prohibition 

 upon all private schools. 



Nor has America entirely escaped the dwarfing influence of such a 

 system. A recent writer says that while the percentage of college gradu- 

 ates is rapidly increasing, strange as it may seem, the percentage of col- 

 lege-bred men in public positions is decreasing. This, however, does 

 not show that we as Americans are slow to recognize ability, for in no 

 other country is true merit so sure to be rewarded ; but I believe it 

 does show that our education has a tendency to unfit men for the prac- 

 tical affairs of life. The demand is not for cultured minds filled with 

 facts tumbling over each other in the dark, but for minds trained to 

 independent thought. The question is repeated more and more em- 

 phatically, not what do you know, but what can you do ? Every vo- 

 cation of life is crying itself hoarse for men men with the intellectual 

 audacity to think and the moral courage to do. 



It is the tendency of state education to make all intellectually alike, 

 by urging the slow and restraining the fast, by giving a surface polish 

 to the dull and bedimming the brilliant. Its tendency is to crush 

 genius and enthrone mediocrity. It is the great leveling influence of 

 modern times. This procrustean system binds its tender victims upon 

 its inexorable bedstead of iron, and if found too short it cruelly at- 

 tempts to stretch them out, until not unfrequently the brittle thread of 

 life itself is broken in the effort ; and if, when placed upon it, they 

 perchance extend beyond its limits, they are as remorselessly trimmed 

 down to the required standard. 



Fortunately for mankind, some of the great minds of the age es- 

 caped the influence of popular education. When at the age of four- 

 teen Henry Thomas Buckle won his first prize, his parents asked him 

 to name anything he chose as an additional reward, and, with his won- 

 derful precocity, he asked to be removed from public school. His re- 

 quest was granted, and who that has read his " History of Civiliza- 

 tion " can doubt the wisdom of his choice ? Herbert Spencer, any one 

 of whose numerous volumes would place him in the first rank, not only 

 as a student of human nature but also as a philosopher and man of let- 

 ters, was never at public school. John Stuart Mill, than whom Eng- 

 land has never produced a greater, who united in one mind the wisdom 

 of the ancients and the learning of the moderns, who was at once an 

 Aristotle and a Bacon, who was not only a profound philosopher but 

 also a practical man of affairs, was singularly exempt from the influ- 



