to represent them in the Legislature. The obliging man took up a cradle
and led the gang round the field. The whole thirty voted for him.

What is scholarship? The learned Hindu can repeat I do not know how many
thousands of lines from the Vedas, and perhaps backwards as well as
forwards. I heard of an excellent old lady who had counted how many times
the letter A occurs in the Holy Scriptures. The Chinese students who
aspire to honors spend years in verbally memorizing the classics
--Confucius and Mencius--and receive degrees and public advancement upon
ability to transcribe from memory without the error of a point, or
misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the whole of some books of
morals. You do not wonder that China is today more like an herbarium than
anything else. Learning is a kind of fetish, and it has no influence
whatever upon the great inert mass of Chinese humanity.

I suppose it is possible for a young gentleman to be able to read--just
think of it, after ten years of grammar and lexicon, not to know Greek
literature and have flexible command of all its richness and beauty, but
to read it!--it is possible, I suppose, for the graduate of college to be
able to read all the Greek authors, and yet to have gone, in regard to
his own culture, very little deeper than a surface reading of them; to
know very little of that perfect architecture and what it expressed; nor
of that marvelous sculpture and the conditions of its immortal beauty;
nor of that artistic development which made the Acropolis to bud and
bloom under the blue sky like the final flower of a perfect nature; nor
of that philosophy, that politics, that society, nor of the life of that
polished, crafty, joyous race, the springs of it and the far-reaching,
still unexpended effects of it.

Yet as surely as that nothing perishes, that the Providence of God is not