and remunerative employments, and subject themselves to mean
humiliations, simply to get their names into a newspaper, and to
achieve a little official importance and social distinction. This
desire for distinction seems to run through the whole social body,
as a kind of moral scrofula, developing itself in various ways,
according to circumstances and peculiarities of constitution. The
consequence is that politics have become the pursuit of small men,
and we no longer have an opportunity to put the best men into
office. The scramble for place among fools is so great and so
successful, that men of dignity and modesty retire from the field
in disgust. Everybody wants to "be something," and in order to be
something, everybody must leave his proper place in the world, and
assume a position which God never intended he should fill. Look in
upon a State legislature once, and you will find sufficient
illustration of my meaning. Not one man in five of the whole
number possesses the first qualification for making the laws of a
State, and half of them never read the constitution of the
country. I mean no contempt for the good, honest men of whom our
State legislatures are principally composed, but I wish simply to
say that there is nothing in their quality of mind, habits of
thought, intellectual power, or style of pursuits that fits them
for the great and momentous functions of legislation. They are
there, a set of "nobodies," mainly for the purpose of becoming
"somebodies," and not for any object connected with the good of
the State.

Somehow, all the students in all our schools get the idea, that a
man in order to be "somebody" must be in public life. Now think of
the fact that the millions attending school in this country have
in some way acquired this idea, and that only one in every one