daily more and more to be solved, in an age of enterprise, travel,
and emigration, like the present. For the truth must be told, that
the great majority of men who are now distinguished by commercial
success, have had a training the directly opposite to that which
they are giving to their sons. They are for the most part men who
have migrated from the country to the town, and had in their youth
all the advantages of a sturdy and manful hill-side or sea-side
training; men whose bodies were developed, and their lungs fed on
pure breezes, long before they brought to work in the city the
bodily and mental strength which they had gained by loch and moor.
But it is not so with their sons. Their business habits are learnt
in the counting-house; a good school, doubtless, as far as it goes:
but one which will expand none but the lowest intellectual
faculties; which will make them accurate accountants, shrewd
computers and competitors, but never the originators of daring
schemes, men able and willing to go forth to replenish the earth
and subdue it. And in the hours of relaxation, how much of their
time is thrown away, for want of anything better, on frivolity, not
to say on secret profligacy, parents know too well; and often shut
their eyes in very despair to evils which they know not how to
cure. A frightful majority of our middle-class young men are
growing up effeminate, empty of all knowledge but what tends
directly to the making of a fortune; or rather, to speak correctly,
to the keeping up the fortunes which their fathers have made for
them; while of the minority, who are indeed thinkers and readers,
how many women as well as men have we seen wearying their souls
with study undirected, often misdirected; craving to learn, yet not
knowing how or what to learn; cultivating, with unwholesome energy,
the head at the expense of the body and the heart; catching up with
the most capricious self-will one mania after another, and tossing