because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a
certain amount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession.

If the student got little from his mates, he got little more
from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his
purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at
bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did
not want to be one in a hundred -- one per cent of an education.
He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had
value, and he wanted the whole of it. He got barely half of an
average. Long afterwards, when the devious path of life led him
back to teach in his turn what no student naturally cared or
needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of faculty-meetings
by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found himself
graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed
-- mathematics -- barring the few first scholars, failure was so
nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value,
and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an
accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his
education failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a
mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but
he needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language,
and he never reached the alphabet.

Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from
the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories of
free-trade and protection, he got little from Political Economy.
He could not afterwards remember to have heard the name of Karl
Marx mentioned, or the title of "Capital." He was equally
ignorant of Auguste Comte. These were the two writers of his time