STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. I37 



There were giants, natural giants, we were told in those days; prodigies; 

 men who rose above all law; and wc need never expect such an age 

 again. But unfortunately for these theories, the miracles kept multiplying 

 till they became almost the only settled law of nature. 



I think it will be seen by all, how eminently practical the study of 

 Latin and Greek was, in an age like that, to all young men who aspired 

 to any social or civil distinction whatever. 



The first question that would everywhere be asked the man, as he veiy 

 well knew, was not what he knew, or whaf he could do, but where he 

 graduated ? But I can scarce believe that all will perceive with equal 

 readiness, that that scholistic age, and the rule which attended it, has now 

 forever passed away from this continent, with no possible hope of its 

 return, whether desirable or not. It is as much impossible to make the 

 boys now born in Illinois hold the same view of this college curriculum 

 that the boys of my own age almost universally held, as it is to take them 

 up beyond the fixed stars, and set them to dreaming over the vacuity and 

 frozen brilliancy that reign there. That style of scholarship was then a 

 practical, and the only practical ruling power in the church and in the 

 state. We boys all saw it to be so. It is not so here now, and never will 

 be; and our boys can not be made to see what does not exist and never 

 will again exist. True something of the kind, though infinitely weaker 

 in degree can be brought to bear on the minds of those already deter- 

 mined to enter the ministry, so-called. 



Some few New England families have also striven to keep alive and 

 to transmit to their children, the old New England prejudices of both 

 scholastic caste and scholastic creed; but it is awful hard work for both 

 parents and children ; they both make up a world of wry faces over it. 

 And in so far as they really succeed, they become rather outcasts, than 

 the leaders and rulers of this new western age, into which we are all 

 inevitably born, whether we will or no. 



I was once myself such an inevitable Yankee scholiast in all my 

 habits of thought and action, that it really seemed to me a sort of sacri- 

 lege for such men as Douglas and Lincoln to aspire to the rule of the 

 nation, without any knowledge of Latin and Greek, or any diploma 

 of any sort. But I have at last got bravely over it, and I really believe 

 that I could now listen with composure to the archangel Gabriel, should 

 he deign to speak to me, without asking him to show his sheepskin, or in 

 what college he graduated. 



Scholarship is a good thing, just as eating is a good thing, but neither 

 scholarship nor eating, alone, ever made a man, though 7iotruc manhood 

 can be evolved^ in this age^ without the?n. But both are simply means to 

 this higher e?id of manhood, and only a small part of the indcspersihle 

 means at that ; neither is an ultimate end in itself. True manhood, moral, 

 intellectual, and physical, is the only end which we or our schools ought 

 to propose as an end for our children; to be determined, not by simply 

 what they know, but by what they can and will do, either in real mental 

 or physical labor, or both, for the good of mankind; not by the heiglit of 

 tiie pole they may climb or the wonders they may attract in reaching the 



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