A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE A DANGE&OtTS THING. 49 



dounded to their own injury. They have stood still while 

 others have been moving forward, until the wheel of time 

 in its revolutions has shown them losers in the race of 

 intelligent industry. They have cried &quot;Help, Jupiter!&quot; 

 meanwhile withholding to put their own shoulders to the 

 wheel of the car of progress. 



These conditions must exist no longer. Henceforth, be 

 ing now thoroughly awakened, they must not only labor 

 steadily and with persistent aim, by and through their lead 

 ers, but they themselves must help, with brains and money, 

 to work out their plans for emancipation from the shackles 

 of a monopolizing power that seeks to reduce them to a 

 mere serfdom. The ambition of the farmer should no longer 

 be to send his son to a university, where he will be given an 

 education totally unfitting him for rural life, unless he in 

 tends to become a lawyer, a doctor, or, as the good old 

 Scotch housewife had it, qualify himself to &quot; wag his pow in 

 a pulpit.&quot; 



A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE A DANGEROUS THING. 



Our cities are too full already of ambitious young men 

 who have received education sufficient only to make them 

 consider themselves above honest toil. Failing to earn a 

 livelihood by other means, they become mere penny-a-liners, 

 or sink into degraded insignificance behind the bar of some 

 saloon ; or, perhaps, they mouth vile comedy, nonsense-songs, 

 or worse, behind the footlights of disreputable haunts, where 

 brutish humanity seeks its brutish amusements. 



The picture is severe but not overdrawn. There are hun 

 dreds of once pure and intelligent young men, who, furnished 

 an education superior to their former playmates, have felt 

 themselves better than mere drudges on the farm, and have 

 3 



