FARMEES' INSTITUTES. 2G9 



the other finds it all in the cultivated intelligence reaching to the masses. Let 

 US trace through some of the great landmarks this course of advancement, just 

 for a suggestion of the place occupied in it by educated men. 



Of literature, the storehouse of knowledge and its instrument of power, I need 

 say nothing. AVe all know that in all particulars it has sprung, with rare excep- 

 tions, from the men of previous training. It takes a Shakespeare and a Burns 

 to prove the rule. 



In general morals there is scarcely the needed exception, unless we count the 

 advent of Christianity such. The great reformers have been men of culture, 

 who appealed to reasonable creatures through their trained abilities. Among 

 the Hebrews, from whom we have the fullest record of such movements, it was 

 first Moses, "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," who taught them 

 the decalogue, "the whole duty of man;" next, it was Samuel, trained from 

 babyhood in the chief school of his time, who brought back Israel from the cor- 

 ruption of Eli's sons; and so all the way down. If Christ and the twelve 

 apostles had no intellectual training, Paul, to whom we owe the spread of the 

 gospel to Europe, was especially a scholar. Luther's long course of training in 

 school and college made him the leader he Avas in the great reformation ; while 

 Calvin's rigid faith is still apovv'cr in the world, because his full culture enforced 

 it. The English Wyckliffe and the Scottish Knox both sustained their truth- 

 loving zeal by full discipline of mind. Even minor reforms find their acknowl- 

 edged source in educated men. You place the college-trained Wilberforce at 

 the head of the British anti-slavery movement, and you scarcely doubt the eager 

 hours of study after a printer's day's work that placed Garrison a champion in 

 our own land. You are not surprised that John Howard, the inaugurato'r of 

 modern philanthropy toward criminals, that seeks to make our prisons places of 

 repentance and reform, instead of '"'hells on earth," was vrell educated. 



Do not misunderstand this. It is not that only the educated are good, nor 

 even that all the educated are good. It is simply that we expect power to do 

 good from the trained intelligence, and have a right to expect it. 



In the promotion of stable government sustained by other than military power 

 we find the same class of men at work. I will not stop to trace the progress, 

 but it surely was no accident that the first really well established king of Eng- 

 land, to Avhom is given the credit of forming the country, was the educated 

 lover of learning, Alfred the Great. Is it strange that of the fifty-six who 

 signed the declaration of our independence (a step that the Avorld is celebrating 

 to-day) forty-one were educated men, thirty being regular graduates ? 



Here, too, we must not mistake the bearing. Many a man has done wisely 

 in government by his innate jjowers trained in daily experience, but the bulk of 

 the power has been from the limited ranks of the educated. President Hays, 

 of AV'ashington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, has given statistics 

 of our own government officers, showing that "a fragment of societ}^, certainly 

 less than a hundredth part," furnishes more than two-thirds of the cabinet 

 officers, thirteen out of fifteen presidents, eight out of nine chief justices, and 

 two-thirds of the associate judges. 



If we inquire after the great discoveries that have made the w^orld wiser and 

 .wealthier, leaving out the precious metals, which have cost all they come to, 

 there is little that we do not owe to the students whose names are household 

 words. If Franklin is an exception in having had no training in school, he is 

 a still greater exception on the other side in having been a hard student without 

 school. Even in geographical discover}^, the jilainest of all sailing, the educated 



